View Full Version : Ibm 5100


Noa Put
December 18th, 2016, 03:21 PM
I sometimes see topics about laptops and how some have performance issues handling 4K material, well, wait no more, get the new IBM 5100 "portable" computer, only 50 pound and you can plug it in anywhere, you also can have it for a reasonable cost, only US $19,975, it has a 1.9MHz processor with a whopping 16K ram memory installed.

IBM 5100 First Portable Computer commercial 1977 - YouTube

For specs: IBM 5100 computer (http://oldcomputers.net/ibm5100.html)

Boyd Ostroff
December 18th, 2016, 04:38 PM
Man, I wanted one of those SO bad back then. But I ended up settling for one of the first Apple ][ computers in 1978 instead. :)

I got the 16K RAM option, which was about $1,300 - the basic model only had 4k but that was not enough to load floating point BASIC and you were limited to the integer BASIC that was burned into ROM. There was no floppy drive, you had to provide your own cassette tape deck. No monitor either, it had composite video output for connecting to a TV set.

Those were the days!