CLARIFICATIONS: There's some confusion about the keyboard layout: I was sorta right and sorta wrong. Fact #1: The keyboard layout we're used to now is based on the Enhanced PC Keyboard, better known as the Model M. I mixed up the release of the Model M and the PC-AT layout, so I wasn't comparing to the right one - but the 5140 is also a weird hybrid with elements from both. Fact #2: Nobody _had_ a Model M yet. They were announced the same day as the Convertible, per Infoworld. Fact #3: Reviewers were upset about the layout changes, yes - but _not the same ones as me._ For instance, PrtScr really was located to the right of shift on the PC/XT keyboard, which I should have known, since I owned one (although I try my best to forget that experience.) It _wasn't_ located there on the AT keyboard, but even by 86 that was probably not taken to be the "standard" layout. So magazines weren't upset about PrtScr; they were upset about Ctrl and Caps Lock being moved around to their current locations, which was about to happen to all PC keyboards a year later when IBM made the M standard for the PS/2. Fact #4: F11 and F12 are indeed moved to F1 and F2, despite not being labeled as such. I had nothing to test this with, so I didn't confirm, but that's what Infoworld said. It seems odd that they aren't labeled - but what's even odder is that they're there at all. Those keys were added on the Model M, so again no reviewer would have bemoaned their absence, since nobody had ever seen them before and nothing supported them. I assume they were a last-second addition as the Model Ms design was finalized, and it was too late to reprint the keycaps.
@@poofygoof They're a Model M thing. IBM sold a version of the Model M that worked with the PC and XT. THe most noticeable thing about those is the lack of toggle key indicator lights. Plus, the AT originally came with a version of the Model F, with the onyl additional key being SysRq.
Just FYI, this isn’t pinned at the top for me like it seems to be intended, in fact it’s almost at the bottom and I just happened to scroll far enough!
Well dang dude, this was excellent. One of my favorite portable-ish machines that I never use, what a great breakdown of its... well I was gonna say "pros and cons" but eh. Cons and the sorta neat stuff. Also I've never seen that particular little green mono display before, I love it. I have the goofy-looking rounded CGA one from IBM but I never thought it matched the rest of the machine.
@@CathodeRayDude I've got three boxed 5145 monitors sitting around from my time at CR. Would one of those be something you might be potentially interested in? I'm not sure where you're located though, and shipping a CRT is always risky
Fun fact: the Game Boy was almost cancelled because Hiroshi Yamauchi couldn’t see the TN panel _at all._ Sharp gave Nintendo an early deal on STN panels at the last minute, and the project was saved.
Dude, please don't apologize about some of the concerns you had about the production of this video. The result is fantastic! I'd never even heard of this beast, and I really appreciate you having spent what is probably many many many hours of work to put this all together! Thanks!
Exactly. “okay its a curiousity” alright this is from IBM - somebody made a business case for this - it’s clearly in response to competition. IBM in the 80’s was kinda like Sony in the 90’s and 2000’s - extremely inbred 800 pound gorilla and happy to create their own standards, but they did great things before collapsing into their current state. LOTS to talk about there, you just have to dig a little. And it’s been 40 years… it’s tales from a world apart where the politics of the computer industry are from a different era that’s only vaguely similar to ours. I know x86, I know your way around dos, I’ve used floppies, I’ve even used apple IIs in educational settings. The heyday of windows 3.1, 8 and 16 bit DOS is still alien.
I suspect the printer has to be placed on first for weight reasons. It's probably the heaviest add-on available and IBM may have been afraid of it falling off under its own weight when the whole unit was lugged around. That also would explain the more complicated latching mechanism vs the friction fit of the smaller modules. Absolutely wonderful video as always!
Yep, seems almost certain. Also, the other expansions might be able to function as armor against drops without being as likely to break as the printer would.
I had this same thought immediately after he said it had to be first while remembering him picking it up with all three expansions and cringing a little in anticipation of something snapping off. I image if it was last, the other two expansions probably couldn't support the weight.
Oh also as you mention the others being friction fit: the printer at the back indeed very likely would have pulled everything out to the ground if it was at the back.
it's also possible that the current draw from the printer warranted it being closest to the power source. The designers might not have thought it was a good idea to draw power through several daisy-chained connectors before getting to the rather power hungry thermal printer.
I love that the CPU state is stored in the removable lcd monitor. Feels like an 80s style Williams memory tube. Makes you wonder, if you had two monitors, and you suspended with one on, removed it, then rebooted with the second monitor, suspended and replaced it with the first, what would happen? Probably a crash, but totally something I would try if I had all the parts.
I can only think that it wouldn't work as if it was saved to the memory of the lcd (which could be in the lcd housing) that as soon as you remove it, it would have power loss and when you plugged in the secondary display the pc would just boot from cold as it were. However as it's still "powered up" even in suspend and it used the graphics memory to store the suspend image you could damage the board by unplugging the LCD. Just my thoughts and I could be totally wrong on this
@@presentarmsonlinux it's going to depend on whether the memory in the LCD is Static RAM or not. If it is then such a swap could be doable. But as I predicted before it would probably result in a crash unless you took steps to replicate similar enough sessions. Ie, upon booting you load up the same game, get to the same point on either session (with maybe the player in a different location to make sure it worked), then swap. Again probably going to crash, but I would still try it just to say I did.
@@jonmcentire I had forgotten about static ram, a previous commenter has said that the memory is in the monitor so I think that it would be saved only on that monitor. :) I'd like to try myself though 😁
"Its actually a _thermal_ printer!" Every nerd in a 10 mile radius perked when you said that. We all have at least one. We're all going to build that thermal { instant camera | weather station | logger | teletype } eventually!
Back in 1998 when I worked as a video game developer , we used a 9-inch monochrome monitor as a secondary display to show text data (physics engine variables) while debugging a full-screen Direct3D flight simulator. One of the senior devs on my team wrote a custom driver that let us log text directly to the secondary screen from our code. It was really cool at the time. Eventually it got replaced by remote debugging using a second PC once that became an option.
@@wkrick Thanks for your work making one of the greats of my childhood! IIRC it either rendered in software with directdraw or in hardware with glide, though.
Honestly the reveal that IBM effectively invented the modern concept of standby with this machine absolutely blew my mind (also using the LCD controller for storage is the goofiest goddamn thing I've ever heard). Fantastic video!
@@stavinaircaeruleum2275 a LCD controller usually just tells a computer information about the panel. Refresh rate, supported resolutions officially, User Interface Display if its also a standalone display. It just holds information. So it kinda makes sense to me that it would just be a storage chip, be it flash or otherwise.
This guy doesn't look like a guy from tv but has a fantastic presenting style and voice for it compared to 99% of TH-camrs. He isnt talking really really slowly like most guys too! 😮
I honestly like the concept of the longer videos. First of all you can put just more Information in a video. Also it's just nice to sit down after work, watching something about an interesting topic or product and be entertained for a good amount of time. Thank you.
I just listen to them while working & doing stuff around the house. Every time i find a decent podcast its either too short, too political, or its uploaded to less than once a month. Long form TH-cam content is still better at this point.
the part at 37:40 where you remove your own camera AND THEN SEE YOURSELF PUTTING IT AWAY in the reflection of the phone was wonderful. i love those little details. also, TWO OF THEM
My uncle used to work for IBM in Boca Raton (FL) and gave me his old one when I was 10 in 1990. It had the original leather carrying case that fit the laptop, thermal printer and cords. I also had the matching CGA green screen external monitor. I just to joke you could drive a semi through those LCD pixels. I loved to play donkey race in basic and a golf game but I think I did a ton in the word processing app I had (wordperfect maybe?). Oh the memories!! Thanks for this.
Did any of your friends have a computer at the time? What did they - both those with and without a computer at home - think about this machine in 1990?
@@no1DdC Long story but it was when I first moved in with my other uncle. I had one friend that thought it was cool but my other two at the time just didn’t care. Most of my friends were on BBS at the time so while they through it was cool they had computers of their own so it was like “meh, that’s cool” as far as I can remember though. I definitely remember I thought it was cooler than everyone else did. lol
As someone who grew up small in the 80s, I missed a lot of this stuff - I was off pirating c64 software and running BBS software in my tween years... I thought I was hip to what was going on, I was not. I have since gone out of my geekery into my adult life only to come back to nerdism. I know you say that it is hard to make content, but I rarely, if ever, see anything like your style of historical deep dives. Holy shiitakes, you do your homework and even stuff, like this, that I have next to no interest in collecting or tweaking - absolutely fascinates me when you talk about it. I'm not alone, I can see the comment from LGR. You are a gift to the retro community here. Thank you, I mean that.
The suspend and resume feature makes this thing desirable to me even if it wasn't portable... That's just an extremely modern feeling feature back in the 80s. You could leave work, go home, go to sleep, and then come back and boot your PC up and be right back on what you were doing. That must've been, like shocking to people then.
The standard keyboard on all IBM PC models at the time the Convertible was released only had function keys up to F10, so the lack of F11 and F12 on its keyboard wasn't a problem. And the keyboards designed for the IBM PC and XT didn't have Caps/Num/Scroll Lock lights, so that wasn't necessarily an expected feature at the time, either. BASIC in ROM was included for compatibility with software which required it, and to be able to tell that you were using a genuine IBM PC. No other brand of PCs had BASIC in ROM, so its presence was an easy way for software to tell that you were using a genuine IBM, rather than a clone. (And one minor correction: the IBM PCjr also had a cassette port, not just the original IBM PC, although very few people actually used it.)
Re the keyboard, check pinned comment - the 5140 was released concurrently with the Enhanced Keyboard and thus has F11,12 as overloads, but otherwise yes I flubbed this.
@@vwestlife this comment and the one referred to are both waaaay down in the ordering for me, and indeed the pinning didn’t seem to stick. (Edit: it’s pinned now!)
this got me through a lengthy visit to the waiting room of ER. thank you for getting my "two of them" anxiety out of the way relatively early. I was worried when you didn't have two of these machines on hand
Before windows, I used a TSR clock shareware program that you selected the location and format digital clock via command line parameters that used screen text. It was cool at the *ahem* time.
Borland developer IDEs for Turbo C, Turbo Pascal etc. all took advantage of the fact that MDA used different addressing to all other graphics cards. Even into the 90s it was useful to have a cheap MDA card with a VGA card in your PC, where you can use the MDA output for the IDE while debugging your DOS programs. It was awesome at the time, especially if you did heavy optimisation in assembly :) By the way, I love that you are watching DS9 in the background while editing the video... Such a familiar workflow... :)
I’ve noticed TNG while editing too. It’s good noise for those of us with ADHD, dynamic enough to not be tuned-out entirely like a fan or ocean sounds, but familiar-enough that you CAN focus on the task at hand and miss half the episode to no great loss. A great scene in this DS9 to pause on too. I always felt they had so much comedic potential left on the floor with Keiko being accepting of both Kira and Julian. When they realise they’d have a wonderful time in that cabin in the woods is my favourite scene, but this massage is a close second. Nowadays of course there’s the polycule jokes like “this is my husband Miles and my girlfriend Keiko and my husband’s boyfriend Julian and his boyfriend Garak”. I guess they didn’t have big-enough brains for that in the 90s (I say tongue in cheek); but nevertheless I wish they hadn’t abandoned that tension they have in this episode.
@@kaitlyn__L Exactly why I noticed - I always have something familiar playing on a spare screen while working and have done so since the mid-90s, and DS9 has been played so often I have lost count.. but what an excellent story. I think the social dynamics on DS9 would have been written still chained in what was socially acceptable in the 1990s, so they probably didn't want to risk alienating audiences by taking things "too far", but one of the outstanding things from DS9 is the characters compared to other shows in the franchise. Miles' bromance is utterly adorable, and the depth of everyone's relationships in general is something that shines throughout the show, including how personalities change and evolve. Life is grey, not black and white.
I'm an 65 year old engineer that programmed this IBM for quite a while in the late 80s. We purchased the serial modules, stripped the guts and designed an internal AtoD card with a 3 axis accelerometer that fit in the original case. This was sold to Boeing for an engineer to collect data on commercial, scheduled flights in the days when all devices must be off and under thr seat. This was a clandestine way for Boeing to collect data. Worked great.
22:59 that is a very realistic possibilty. LEDs in those days were not the blindingly bright ones of today. The standard red standby LED would be running at 10 to 20mA. It's not a whole lot, but it would have an actual measurable effect on battery life.
Great video. IBM actually experimented with TONS of innovative stuff but never really brought anything to the market for some reason. Also they were greedy as heck thus all the proprietary stuff. Also, I hope that static screen on the later clarification part is on purpose because it really made me laugh. Surprised no top comment mentioned it.
I've still got my PC Convertible, and the serial/parallel module. When you started talking about the backlight, I was thinking "wait, I'm sure mine isn't backlit!" then you went on to explain the two screen options 🙂. The carrying handle is made of metal, and feels quite trustworthy to me.
I didn't realize this was such a long video about a machine that prints a letter at you and waits for you to type DIR until 3 minutes before it finished. Thanks for the video.
I really hope this is a compliment. ‘I don’t have time and/or can’t pay attention to long videos so I must impose my deficiencies on everyone else. All the OTHER humans on the planet MUST align with my irritatingly short attention span and I’m the most important person on Earth!’ Just don’t watch it. Or watch it IN PARTS like every other busy human who can’t binge watch the whole thing in one go. There is this awesome feature where TH-cam stores your progress so you can resume watching the video at literally any time. To all the complainers ruining gloriously long, entertaining, and deep dive videos for the vast majority of the rest of us, be quiet and watch in parts or go watch the bazillion shitty 5 minute, fake information summary videos TH-cam is already packed full of. TH-cam even made a tab for people like you. Go to the shorts tab and don’t come back. Do. Not. Ruin. It. For. Us. Please. I love these long videos. They keep me sane. I don’t have to constantly keep searching for a new and entertaining video during my grinding and seemingly endless 12+ hour shifts, cleaning up crap off the walls. This is my salvation. I’m a caregiver. Healthcare worker. If you want me to stay sane while I take care of your dying parents or relatives and continue to take good care of them while you cannot, do not ruin our beloved long video producing creators. I can’t touch the screen when I have on gloves with poop all over them. All I ask is that creators like CRD are allowed, supported, and not harassed for creating long videos. I absolutely love these long videos! If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for your time and reading my ventilation. Cheers to long videos. May they never die, lol.
Things like you showing the band "a perfect circle" when talking about a perfect circle is the reasons why I keep rewatching all the videos here as well as being subbed to catch the new ones, the gags are just so perfectly executed and koRny
I love how insanely comprehensive this video is -- it's a REALLY excellent overview of the IBM 5140 and all of its bells and whistles. I don't have an actual 5140, but I've had the monochrome IBM 5144 monitor as my second monitor on my PC for about 3 or 4 years now (using an HDMI2AV converter and some custom aspect ratio settings in the AMD control panel), and I freaking love using it with PuTTY when SSH'ing in to SDF or my home server. It's got a beautiful display, paired with decent contrast/brightness controls with an insanely nice (cast zinc?) base. I do have a Tandy 1400FD, which is a similar portable machine, but the keyboard on it is near completely awful and I've only been able to get the built-in screen to work once for a short time after recapping the power supply. I think the fact that the IBM seems to work out of the box 40 years later might be a bit of a testament to its build quality, even if they did make a significant number of mistakes compared to other manufacturers.
In the mid 1980's I was selling computer and sold both the Jr and the Convertible. The Convertible came out on April 1, 1986. The magazine article you showed was July, which is about right as magazines were out 1-2 months before the published date back then, so the timing was about right, perhaps a month late, to match up. it was IBM's first computer to ship with a 3.5 inch as a standard drive. A year later, the PS/2 line followed suite with the 3.5 as standard drives. I always felt like the convertible recycled PC Jr components that they probably had a lot of after it failed, hence the similar expansion style and the monitor cable (plus using the PC Jr monitor by default). It might also explain the lack of better integration on these expansion cartridges as they might have been adapted from PC Jr. I had a similar thought about the length, especially if you added the printer. Thanks for the nostalgia trip.
I love the snap-on printer. Portable thermal printers were the bomb, I kinda wish someone would build a more modern one. Imagine how small they could make one today. I still use a Citizen PN-50 from the mid 90's (Epson LQ2550 emulation), I've used 7.2v RC-car NiMh packs to keep it working on the go, much like you did for the 5140.
The one that ships with the ClockworkPi DevTerm kits looks pretty cool. The whole assembled thing gives off real TRS-80 Model 100 vibes, and they ship a few ARM versions as well as a RISC-V version. Even though I'm convinced it serves any practical purpose at all (because keyboard, screen and printer are TINY, and CPUs are slow) I almost want one anyway just as a piece of modern art.
@@lasskinn474 The Epson (and HP) mobile printers are HUMONGOUS (by at least 2x) compared to my nearly 30 year old Citizen (which also has a battery inside it!). www.acrpc.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0681.jpg
You could always show off things with TH-cam shorts if you don't have much to say about them. This is my first time watching your channel, I appreciate the length of the video! You cover a lot.
Thanks for your video, they're always very interesting! Just a request: when you state the size or weight of something, can you also add the equivalent in metric units? Even by writing it on screen, it would be really useful for people who watch you outside US and are not familiar with the imperial system
A good mental math trick to get close enough is just half any weight in pounds to get within 10% of the weight in kilos. When it comes to size measurements it’s a bit trickier but treat it as double and a half for inches, so for 12 inches double to 24 and had the half (6) for 30cm which is close enough.
If you want some more 640x200 action in something more useful in a modern sense, check out the NEC MobilePro (preferably the 780 or 900). I used one in high school, which made me the first person with a laptop. People thought I was crazy until they were buying my perfect biology notes and watching tiny videos in study hall. Edit after finishing the video: Nah Dude, your presentation was top-notch as per usual. Was able to see the screen pretty well; except for...well, when no one would be able to. Excellent!
Great video! And great to see Gene's work mentioned! I got to meet Gene at Computer Reset where he volunteered most of the events building PC Jrs and helping people find their treasures.
That was a really great watch! So far you have done a great job of inspiring my research and tinkering into video and a great job of making me think "thats cool but is it really THAT cool?" Thanks CRD 😊
This was my first PC compatible computer, back in about 1990. Picked it up at an auction for £50. From what I learned from watching this, mine was a Mk.1, with 512Kb RAM, and the Ser/Par add-on. It did have a lovely keyboard, but not much else positive to say about it. I soon upgraded to a desktop computer with VGA and a hard disk. Cheers!
The alarm TSR most likely sets a timer via the RTC which would trigger a hardware interrupt. That hardware interrupt line from the RTC is probably responsible for also waking up the machine. This resume thinf is very cool stuff for the time.
@@BrendonGreenNZL I was thinking that too, but I didn't see DOS asking to set the time and date on startup so I was making the assumption that it did... I wouldn't be surprised, because by this time IBM were already making machines with NiCad battery-backed RTCs. The 5140 most likely came with such a thing in there, and references I found online seem to indicate it came with a built-in RTC but I didn't dig far. My IBM machines from that era all came with horrible NiCad packs to power the RTC :)
Fun story about "Dangerous Dave" by John Romero, published by Softdisk: Softdisk was where John Romero, John Carmack, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack worked before founding id software. They used Softdisk PCs (at night) to do a lot of their game programming. They also made games for Softdisk, which shipped them out regularly. Dangerous Dave made another appearance when John Carmack figured out how to make the background scroll (notice the background is static in your Dangerous Dave in this video). Scrolling backgrounds weren't a thing in PC gaming until Carmack figured it out. They tried to sell the idea to Nintendo by cloning Super Mario Bros 3's level 1-1 as a demo. It was called "Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement". Nintendo didn't bite, so they used the tech to make Commander Keen, which was id's first release and the game that gave them the income to create Wolfenstein 3d.
I had a Convertable along with the printer - which of course clipped on the back just like the expansion ports. It was thermal and came with an enclosure that stored a small roll of fax paper, so you could get a medium-rez, terribly curly printout. Since on mine, the roll was internal, it might have been even longer than the one you show.
Back in the 80s I remember a lot of software coming with both 5.25" and 3.5" disks in the package, because of how long the transition from 5.25" to 3.5" took. I feel like it wasn't until the 90s when software would regularly come on just 3.5".
This is such an amazing video. I really did find it interesting, as you highlight the mindset or rational behind design decisions at the time and put them in context with other things going on. Its about more than the computer itself and thats why i like it so much.
This is the first of your videos to enter my life, and I love that you're like an alternate reality version of the character 'Peter Griffin', where he has his life together and are actually worthy of Lois. You're awesome!
Huh, I have one of those little IBM monitors but never really stopped to wonder what it was for. I also didn't know the filter was removable! Great little monitor, though, used to use it a lot for testing things just because of its size/weight. More recently I've connected it to a Video Floppy camera for some aesthetic photo nonsense.
Fun fact: IPL is still the term IBM uses for the process of rebooting its mainframes. It's slightly more complicated than a reboot, but that's the gist of what it's doing.
I have never heard of your channel before but this video popped up and I figured why not watch it. I'm glad I did. None of this info is worth much to me in the greater scheme of things but I for some reason am glad I learned this. You really didn't have to apologize for the video length or editing it was all good. I am now a subscriber and look forward to more interesting content.
I had a DG One which my dad got when he worked at DG, they also had a screen upgrade which made it slightly less terrible, sadly long-gone. Also, on the MDA+CGA thing, I believe a bunch of PC debuggers were built to have their interface on an MDA display for ease of use.
Yes, I remember Turbo Pascal had this feature (Turbo Debugger) to show the running program on one screen (CGA/EGA/VGA) and the registry/stack/data and other info on an MDA/Hercules mono display. Also I vaguely remember PSpice having a similar feature (maybe I am wrong), showing the program on MDA and running the simulation graph on CGA.
The Amstrad PPC had a supertwist 640×200 LCD with rectangle pixels to preserve aspect ratio. Also, dual MDA+CGA setup was not uncommon with software development. Even Borland's debugger supported such a mode.
In spite of your own perception your video is well structured and informative. It might not be perfect but life is just like that. Thank you for all your efforts.
Will continue to tell you that I think you’re wonderful and I adore your content, presentation of said content and how genuine you are. Thank you so much for your efforts and for just being alive, being you… As soon as I’m more financially able, I will happily and proudly become a patron. Again, thank you so dearly for being you.
I desperately want to read the deleted bits of the script, this was extremely cool. The laws of physics are what they are, and you have to keep to the PC standard if you want it to sell. So often the sales pitch of novel features in 80's PCs and software are too good to be true, the platform didn't lend itself to much more than what most users got. But sometimes IBM makes the resume feature ~15 years before ACPI was standardized, sometimes it isn't a kludge where they saved the memory and registers to floppy, sometimes, rarely, they actually did the thing. Look, most of the things that you desperately wanted to buy out of the back of a magazine when you were a kid probably didn't work the way you would have wanted them to, but this channel seems to be trying to answer the question of 'but what if they did?' What if those bizarre moonshots hidden in the mundane actually kept their promises?
My favorite part of your videos is the context you bring to every feature of a device you're describing: you can clearly explain which parts of this laptop were bad, acceptable or top of the line for the time and have solid theories on how the manufacturer decided on those parts.
Uh-oh, the Elektronnika BK001 you showed as an example for an easter block machine - that was the first computer I ever touched and played with, back in 1987 or so. And to be peddy its a pdp-11 clone not zx spectrum.
Oh yeah, I recorded the narration and *then* had to find a suitable picture, and it turned out that all the actual spectrum clones had very poor photos.
I was just watching another of your videos when TH-cam recommended me this one and I sat there trying to figure out why I'd never seen this one before until I saw it was from today. Always glad to see a new CRD drop!
"How dare CRD assume I have nearly 90 minutes of time to watch a video about an obscure thing from decades ago!" [appears in Action Button's westernized Boku no Natsuyasumi box art shirt] Ah ha ha, you got me.
Actually, programs like the App Selector where more useful than you would think. My dad started using computers around 1983 and stayed with DOS until about 1995, but to my knowledge he never ever used one single DOS command. I don't know how he did it on his first DOS-PC, which still had 2 diskette drives, but on the second one he had a simple batch-based program selector where you typed in a 2-digit number to access any program. So the PC would start up, go right to the program selector, and when exiting a program you would be back to the program selector again. So there was no DOS knowledge needed what so ever.
I was thinking most businessmen would vastly prefer a menu over typing in programs, even if it took longer to boot. Those format and copy commands seem really useful to a lay user too, since people often struggled with remembering the operand order.
The display adapter wasn't the only thing they apparently borrowed from the IBM PCjr. The modem also sounds very similar to the one for the PCjr, and I was able to get Procomm to use it, although downloading binary data was ... interesting. I have a Data General One, and it has the second best keyboard I've ever used on a laptop, the best being the IBM laptop you showed off (a friend of mine's father worked for IBM Boca and let us use it).
It wouldn’t happen to be the same person in the comments talking about getting one from Boca in 1990 I suppose? It also occurred to me, they could’ve just used all the surplus parts. Connectors, modems, etc, to try and save costs. Might explain some of the larger chips in the expansion blocks too.
Great video! For the alarms in suspend mode thingy: it's probably an interrupt that wakes the CPU. I'm not totally sure, but I know micro-controllers often have the ability to put the processor to sleep only to wake up on an interrupt of some kind. Also, the Macintosh Portable also had static RAM. The next version of that machine changed to pseudo-static RAM, and replaced the display from reflective only to a back-light screen that was supposed to also be okay in bright light, but for me between the two I have, the reflective in a bright room gives the most pleasurable viewing experience for me.
Just started the video and you mention how you have stuff that don't deserve a video but are still pretty neat. I'd like to see those items in the shorts format. The telephone segment was pretty much accidentally a TH-cam short. Keep it up
It really seems that they could have designed it to be stackable; they're already making design choices, not using (many) off-the-shelf parts. Remind me of chaining peripherals on a Commodore 64, that could get a bit stupid with modules extending to the right as far as the eye can see.
CRD you could tell us who manufactured that telephone, its model number, the dates during which it was manufactured, maybe open it up and let us see how its internals are arranged, or even try to look into who designed it and what their thought process was, if it was part of a larger vision for similar capsule-like retractable devices etc...
It's called the Telstar, model 911/2911, manufactured by Western Electric, sold (or originally leased) by the Bell System/AT&T as part of the Design Line series of decorator telephones introduced in the 1970's at their Phone Center stores. The Telstar name was borrowed from the Telstar communications satellite series and it was meant to be a futuristic and modern looking option, and it and several other Design Line phones had the box with lid and retractile cord setup, seems they though everyone wanted to hide the phone when not in use
@@St0rmcrash the Telstar name comes up bizarrely everywhere. The classic football (“soccer ball”) design, such as the emoji uses ⚽️ is also called Telstar. Although in this case, it’s because the black pentagons were said to make it reminiscent of the actual satellite’s appearance, rather than merely trying to cash-in on the futurism of the name/concept of satellite comms. That said, it was one of the first modern synthetic balls as opposed to leather, so it WAS futuristic in that way as well.
@@kaitlyn__L @Stormcrash Holy cow that was beautiful. This is some CONTENT right here 🥰 actual expository essay material that sheds the light of context on a curious piece of history! Well done, both of you! Thank you for putting this forth! Now I can try to juxtapose its appearance against the other Design Line models, or look up if there are any sales records against which I can compare the Telstar 911/2911 to its contemporaries in the market at the time for some gauge of its success (or lack thereof if the case may be). I can already envision a video similar to that of Regular Car Reviews where the presenter Brian "Mr. Regular" Reider weaves for the watcher/listener a narrative tapestry of the era and circumstances, and lightly illustrates a suggestion of the kind of people it was marketed toward and such...
@@Stonehawk I’m glad to have sparked your imagination! Yeah, the smoked acrylic, cylindrical/capsule-like shape and the name were all intended to appeal to forward-thinking folks who kept-up with science and technology. Though, there was hardly anyone who didn’t know what Telstar was, it was about as famous as Sputnik! So it signals that futurism image, without being obscure/exclusive/gatekeepy about it. I might compare to those futurism TV sets from the late 60s and early 70s. Everyone remembers the perfectly round orb ones, but there were a lot of pill and ellipse shaped ones too. And they frequently featured smoked-glass over the screen. Smoked glass or acrylic was just… all the rage! Smoked glass persisted into the straight-lines, avocado and brown later-70s, but this “Telstar” phone design really screamed late 60s early 70s. (From some technical details too, but that’s just being a Western Electric and GPO phone nerd.) Honestly if they didn’t also sell the Telstar in bright orange, red, sky blue, and a few other shades, that’d be a real missed opportunity. Edit; yep, looks like they only made it in black. Must’ve expected it to be in trendy offices and the like. Some of these places say late 70s rather than early or mid, so I guess it was too late for bright colours to be hip.
I use a split, tented ergonomic keyboard, but even I am jealous of that keyboard. The clacking sound alone is so satisfying! Also, I love the idea of the expandable modules. I know they aren't very practical, but I think the physical expansion modules are very satisfying and retro. I can imagine an alternate universe where dozens or even hundreds of third-party expansion modules were released for this convertible pc, and someone had a twenty-foot-long computer!
You can override the alt-ctrl-del in sw so the 'harder' reset key combo is necessary. ...some modern hp laptops have a habit of getting stuck after a bios update needing to unplug the internal battery. Hard resetting that way is kind of a bother to do.
A family member’s HP Stream did that, but of course you couldn’t access the battery to power it off. HP wanted 80% the price of a new machine to do it 🙄 I’d offered to find a way myself but they weren’t interested in “taking the risk” - so they just bought a new machine, which I’m sure was HP’s intent.
@@kaitlyn__L well in my case waiting for x days for it to drain the battery would've "worked" as well. I didn't check if the usb ports were supplying power out to accelerate it
@@lasskinn474 perhaps it wasn’t quite the same error, in this case it never went to the BIOS screen after the update, and they’d tried it after a couple weeks to see if it was any different. It’s possible the self discharge just wasn’t high enough with the fanless design, weak Celeron, and 9 month old lithium. If it just got stuck in the middle of boot I would’ve definitely tried just leaving the screen backlight on to kill it. Anyway, I’m still cheesed-off about that behaviour, so hearing it was common across other laptops felt slightly vindicating!
@@kaitlyn__L oh it didn't get stuck in middle of boot in my case either. It did the update and then went to reset and got stuck in that with screen off and all effectively appearing dead. The irony is that if there was just something wrong with the bios theres a a built in bios rollback in it, its just the bios updaters reset routine that was broken for me
@@lasskinn474 okay, yeah, that perfectly matches what I experienced. An irony is, they’d asked me to help them update it, because the disk was too full to download and install. I had to remove redundant system files and hidden cookies, because the Stream had such small eMMC (IIRC) flash. If I hadn’t done that, it would’ve never installed the BIOS update. It installed the Win10 updates, which I spent literally hours babysitting it during. Afterward it showed the BIOS flashing screen, actually installed the first one, rebooted, went onto the second one, then never came back from a reboot. Backlight would never turn on, etc. Of course on the phone they claimed it needed a new BIOS chip, but I was dubious and saw some people had success with removing the battery. But of course there was no access, like I said at first. The fact HP must’ve known it was a systemic problem, as opposed to it just being something up with the cheapness of the Stream line, makes it even worse honestly. There’s no way they didn’t realise a bunch of their laptops were all behaving that same way. Yet they still had Windows Update automatically download and apply them. I was at first surprised and astounded there was no watchdog or rollback or anything for that behaviour. Knowing there was, but just not triggered by this condition, seems almost even more convenient?
1:24:34 Heck of a still frame on the other monitor. Also, this didn't seem disjointed at all. Weirdly captivating if anything. I liked how your assistant's hands made a few cameos
I cannot watch an hour and a half long movie if you put a gun to my head but a 1:27:36 documentary of some stupid computer from the 80s is always my jam. TBH I wish I could have one of those dock setups for my current laptop; it's a heavy gaming laptop that I mostly use in a docked setup or in bed and plugging in and out all of the cables is a pain lol
Hey, love the content. I don't know if it fits your style, but to show off all those various gadgets, what about doing a list type of video? Something like "10 gadgets from the 90s you've never heard of"
*THIS* is the 1985 IBM PC convertible and it is one of the strangest laptops ever made. It certainly is unusual in many ways and today I'm going to review it. First I'm going to show you all the quirks and features, then I'm going to give it a try, and finally I'll give it a DudeScore.
I have one of those Toshiba early laptops that I got when I volunteered at a thrift store, and it also has an alps full height keyboard. I'm not worried about my idea of ripping out the internals to make a modern PC on top of it because, well, Foone has 2 of them, so I don't think they're rare. Of course, if it works, I might keep it around as a novelty.
@@Kumimono I wonder if they’re building an Ark for tech. Foone’s Ark, so they won’t be forgotten after a major disaster destroys all warehouses and museums
Another note. I actually used this PC for hours writing 6809 assembly code on the planes going back and forth from Detroit to Seattle in the late 80s. I was a God on the plane (at least in my own mind). It was a great keyboard. I think the loud clicking keys either impressed or annoyed my fellow passengers. It didn't fit real well on the tray table! I think I still have some parallel modules at work in the archives!
Nice overview, it was worth it. this is no ordinary PC. The double-strike thing is something I somehow knew but never thought out, mind blown. I'd say the printer having a stronger latch shows the reason it goes on first or sits to the side. The combined weight or perhaps increased leverage of the three modules requiring a better latch being the reason. As for the noise of the printer, it's waaaay quieter than a dot matrix.
![Headstart's PC With The Weird GUI "OS" [Explorer]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/d1jpIiST6ec/mqdefault.jpg)
CLARIFICATIONS:
There's some confusion about the keyboard layout: I was sorta right and sorta wrong.
Fact #1: The keyboard layout we're used to now is based on the Enhanced PC Keyboard, better known as the Model M. I mixed up the release of the Model M and the PC-AT layout, so I wasn't comparing to the right one - but the 5140 is also a weird hybrid with elements from both.
Fact #2: Nobody _had_ a Model M yet. They were announced the same day as the Convertible, per Infoworld.
Fact #3: Reviewers were upset about the layout changes, yes - but _not the same ones as me._ For instance, PrtScr really was located to the right of shift on the PC/XT keyboard, which I should have known, since I owned one (although I try my best to forget that experience.) It _wasn't_ located there on the AT keyboard, but even by 86 that was probably not taken to be the "standard" layout. So magazines weren't upset about PrtScr; they were upset about Ctrl and Caps Lock being moved around to their current locations, which was about to happen to all PC keyboards a year later when IBM made the M standard for the PS/2.
Fact #4: F11 and F12 are indeed moved to F1 and F2, despite not being labeled as such. I had nothing to test this with, so I didn't confirm, but that's what Infoworld said. It seems odd that they aren't labeled - but what's even odder is that they're there at all. Those keys were added on the Model M, so again no reviewer would have bemoaned their absence, since nobody had ever seen them before and nothing supported them. I assume they were a last-second addition as the Model Ms design was finalized, and it was too late to reprint the keycaps.
Aren't F11 and 12 are an AT thing? This was an 8088 system, or did I miss the part where you announced it was a 286?
@@poofygoof They're a Model M thing. IBM sold a version of the Model M that worked with the PC and XT. THe most noticeable thing about those is the lack of toggle key indicator lights. Plus, the AT originally came with a version of the Model F, with the onyl additional key being SysRq.
Just FYI, this isn’t pinned at the top for me like it seems to be intended, in fact it’s almost at the bottom and I just happened to scroll far enough!
@@kaitlyn__L bizarre, thanks TH-cam. I did pin it, it just didn't take
@@CathodeRayDude it’s there now! 👍
Well dang dude, this was excellent. One of my favorite portable-ish machines that I never use, what a great breakdown of its... well I was gonna say "pros and cons" but eh. Cons and the sorta neat stuff.
Also I've never seen that particular little green mono display before, I love it. I have the goofy-looking rounded CGA one from IBM but I never thought it matched the rest of the machine.
Fun Fact: You also have the _only clear photo of it on the entire internet._ I stole it from your twitter. Figured you wouldn't mind :p
@@CathodeRayDude Ha! Not at all
The car TH-camrs have a phrase for that (instead of pros and cons) from Daddy Doug (Doug Demuro) - "quirks and features"
Damn, such praise from LGR is something I would print out and frame on my wall! :)
@@CathodeRayDude I've got three boxed 5145 monitors sitting around from my time at CR. Would one of those be something you might be potentially interested in? I'm not sure where you're located though, and shipping a CRT is always risky
Fun fact: the Game Boy was almost cancelled because Hiroshi Yamauchi couldn’t see the TN panel _at all._ Sharp gave Nintendo an early deal on STN panels at the last minute, and the project was saved.
@lowspecgamer has a great video about the topic
@@MasterGeekMX
Watch now and learn or prepare to suffer (literally)
th-cam.com/video/qJA8S3IpVlI/w-d-xo.html
Wow, hard to imagine the Game Boy was originally designed with an even less clear screen.
@@23Scadu limitations of the time I guess. The pocket and especially color was leagues better
@@vap1777 limitation of price ;)
I appreciate that fact that you were watching Star Trek DS9 while editing. Bless.
it took me too long to find someone else that caught that
He even has it paused with Kira being all kinds of sexy too. By the outro, she's getting a nice shoulder rub by Miles.
Dude, please don't apologize about some of the concerns you had about the production of this video. The result is fantastic! I'd never even heard of this beast, and I really appreciate you having spent what is probably many many many hours of work to put this all together! Thanks!
Agreed, it isn't a time waster or anything, just feels like he did his due diligence.
I'd rather the video be long if it means I get the best info
Exactly. “okay its a curiousity” alright this is from IBM - somebody made a business case for this - it’s clearly in response to competition. IBM in the 80’s was kinda like Sony in the 90’s and 2000’s - extremely inbred 800 pound gorilla and happy to create their own standards, but they did great things before collapsing into their current state.
LOTS to talk about there, you just have to dig a little. And it’s been 40 years… it’s tales from a world apart where the politics of the computer industry are from a different era that’s only vaguely similar to ours. I know x86, I know your way around dos, I’ve used floppies, I’ve even used apple IIs in educational settings. The heyday of windows 3.1, 8 and 16 bit DOS is still alien.
I suspect the printer has to be placed on first for weight reasons. It's probably the heaviest add-on available and IBM may have been afraid of it falling off under its own weight when the whole unit was lugged around. That also would explain the more complicated latching mechanism vs the friction fit of the smaller modules.
Absolutely wonderful video as always!
Yep, seems almost certain. Also, the other expansions might be able to function as armor against drops without being as likely to break as the printer would.
I had this same thought immediately after he said it had to be first while remembering him picking it up with all three expansions and cringing a little in anticipation of something snapping off. I image if it was last, the other two expansions probably couldn't support the weight.
Oh also as you mention the others being friction fit: the printer at the back indeed very likely would have pulled everything out to the ground if it was at the back.
Likewise that different locking hinge approach may be sturdier than the way the other expansions clipped on.
it's also possible that the current draw from the printer warranted it being closest to the power source. The designers might not have thought it was a good idea to draw power through several daisy-chained connectors before getting to the rather power hungry thermal printer.
I love that the CPU state is stored in the removable lcd monitor. Feels like an 80s style Williams memory tube. Makes you wonder, if you had two monitors, and you suspended with one on, removed it, then rebooted with the second monitor, suspended and replaced it with the first, what would happen? Probably a crash, but totally something I would try if I had all the parts.
I can only think that it wouldn't work as if it was saved to the memory of the lcd (which could be in the lcd housing) that as soon as you remove it, it would have power loss and when you plugged in the secondary display the pc would just boot from cold as it were. However as it's still "powered up" even in suspend and it used the graphics memory to store the suspend image you could damage the board by unplugging the LCD. Just my thoughts and I could be totally wrong on this
@@presentarmsonlinux it's going to depend on whether the memory in the LCD is Static RAM or not. If it is then such a swap could be doable. But as I predicted before it would probably result in a crash unless you took steps to replicate similar enough sessions. Ie, upon booting you load up the same game, get to the same point on either session (with maybe the player in a different location to make sure it worked), then swap. Again probably going to crash, but I would still try it just to say I did.
@@jonmcentire I had forgotten about static ram, a previous commenter has said that the memory is in the monitor so I think that it would be saved only on that monitor. :) I'd like to try myself though 😁
@@jonmcentireStatic RAM is still volatile (sorry for necroposting)
The squeakiness of the display hinge is absolutely delightful.
"Its actually a _thermal_ printer!"
Every nerd in a 10 mile radius perked when you said that. We all have at least one. We're all going to build that thermal { instant camera | weather station | logger | teletype } eventually!
Heh. I have one for the Mavica cameras, floppy drive and all. Let me tell you, it ain't instant. :D
@@Kumimono ... a mavica thermal printer? NEED
Mine is a receipt printer. Found it's great for printing out quick notes or info. Sits on my desk toward the back and probably gets used once a week.
i have a game boy printer does that count? lol
Can conform: got a nonfunctional receipt printer for $5 at the flea market. Am huge nerd.
Back in 1998 when I worked as a video game developer , we used a 9-inch monochrome monitor as a secondary display to show text data (physics engine variables) while debugging a full-screen Direct3D flight simulator. One of the senior devs on my team wrote a custom driver that let us log text directly to the secondary screen from our code. It was really cool at the time. Eventually it got replaced by remote debugging using a second PC once that became an option.
What Sim was it?
@@jakobole Red Baron II/3D. I think we also used it for Pro Pilot 98/99.
@@wkrick nice!
@@wkrick Thanks for your work making one of the greats of my childhood! IIRC it either rendered in software with directdraw or in hardware with glide, though.
@@wkrick I loved that game as a child, thank you.
Honestly the reveal that IBM effectively invented the modern concept of standby with this machine absolutely blew my mind (also using the LCD controller for storage is the goofiest goddamn thing I've ever heard). Fantastic video!
How is that even possible?
@@stavinaircaeruleum2275 a LCD controller usually just tells a computer information about the panel. Refresh rate, supported resolutions officially, User Interface Display if its also a standalone display. It just holds information. So it kinda makes sense to me that it would just be a storage chip, be it flash or otherwise.
King Kong couldn’t fit that on his lap
This guy doesn't look like a guy from tv but has a fantastic presenting style and voice for it compared to 99% of TH-camrs. He isnt talking really really slowly like most guys too! 😮
I honestly like the concept of the longer videos. First of all you can put just more Information in a video. Also it's just nice to sit down after work, watching something about an interesting topic or product and be entertained for a good amount of time. Thank you.
excactly. and if it is too long, I just stop watching and continute the next day... yt keeps track where I left, one of the few good features of yt
I just listen to them while working & doing stuff around the house. Every time i find a decent podcast its either too short, too political, or its uploaded to less than once a month. Long form TH-cam content is still better at this point.
the part at 37:40 where you remove your own camera AND THEN SEE YOURSELF PUTTING IT AWAY in the reflection of the phone was wonderful. i love those little details.
also, TWO OF THEM
Videos like this are worth my $20 a month and then some. Love these videos, especially the longer ones.
To me, that SRAM reveal is such a twist, I've never heard of SRAM being used in any consumer products outside of CPU cache
My uncle used to work for IBM in Boca Raton (FL) and gave me his old one when I was 10 in 1990. It had the original leather carrying case that fit the laptop, thermal printer and cords. I also had the matching CGA green screen external monitor. I just to joke you could drive a semi through those LCD pixels. I loved to play donkey race in basic and a golf game but I think I did a ton in the word processing app I had (wordperfect maybe?). Oh the memories!! Thanks for this.
Did any of your friends have a computer at the time? What did they - both those with and without a computer at home - think about this machine in 1990?
@@no1DdC Long story but it was when I first moved in with my other uncle. I had one friend that thought it was cool but my other two at the time just didn’t care. Most of my friends were on BBS at the time so while they through it was cool they had computers of their own so it was like “meh, that’s cool” as far as I can remember though.
I definitely remember I thought it was cooler than everyone else did. lol
#WordStar was popular in portable word processors, if on microcassette 📼.
Thanks! Not just for this episode, but for all you do. You provide worthwhile historical perspective.
As someone who grew up small in the 80s, I missed a lot of this stuff - I was off pirating c64 software and running BBS software in my tween years... I thought I was hip to what was going on, I was not.
I have since gone out of my geekery into my adult life only to come back to nerdism.
I know you say that it is hard to make content, but I rarely, if ever, see anything like your style of historical deep dives. Holy shiitakes, you do your homework and even stuff, like this, that I have next to no interest in collecting or tweaking - absolutely fascinates me when you talk about it.
I'm not alone, I can see the comment from LGR.
You are a gift to the retro community here. Thank you, I mean that.
I did the exact same thing with my c64. My buddy had a 24 hour BBS that he used to run and we were constantly sharing cracked games.
The suspend and resume feature makes this thing desirable to me even if it wasn't portable... That's just an extremely modern feeling feature back in the 80s. You could leave work, go home, go to sleep, and then come back and boot your PC up and be right back on what you were doing. That must've been, like shocking to people then.
Or you could take your computer with you and get back to your project at home without any delay.
The standard keyboard on all IBM PC models at the time the Convertible was released only had function keys up to F10, so the lack of F11 and F12 on its keyboard wasn't a problem. And the keyboards designed for the IBM PC and XT didn't have Caps/Num/Scroll Lock lights, so that wasn't necessarily an expected feature at the time, either.
BASIC in ROM was included for compatibility with software which required it, and to be able to tell that you were using a genuine IBM PC. No other brand of PCs had BASIC in ROM, so its presence was an easy way for software to tell that you were using a genuine IBM, rather than a clone. (And one minor correction: the IBM PCjr also had a cassette port, not just the original IBM PC, although very few people actually used it.)
Re the keyboard, check pinned comment - the 5140 was released concurrently with the Enhanced Keyboard and thus has F11,12 as overloads, but otherwise yes I flubbed this.
@@CathodeRayDude I don't see a pinned comment on this video.
Bizarre.
@@vwestlife this comment and the one referred to are both waaaay down in the ordering for me, and indeed the pinning didn’t seem to stick. (Edit: it’s pinned now!)
@@kaitlyn__L Wir haben einen verzweifelten Mangel an Stecknadeln.
this got me through a lengthy visit to the waiting room of ER. thank you for getting my "two of them" anxiety out of the way relatively early. I was worried when you didn't have two of these machines on hand
Before windows, I used a TSR clock shareware program that you selected the location and format digital clock via command line parameters that used screen text. It was cool at the *ahem* time.
"I don't know what IBM was smoking but they hadn't run out of it" I'm amazed I haven't heard the extension to that phrase until now! thanks gravis!
Borland developer IDEs for Turbo C, Turbo Pascal etc. all took advantage of the fact that MDA used different addressing to all other graphics cards. Even into the 90s it was useful to have a cheap MDA card with a VGA card in your PC, where you can use the MDA output for the IDE while debugging your DOS programs. It was awesome at the time, especially if you did heavy optimisation in assembly :)
By the way, I love that you are watching DS9 in the background while editing the video... Such a familiar workflow... :)
I’ve noticed TNG while editing too. It’s good noise for those of us with ADHD, dynamic enough to not be tuned-out entirely like a fan or ocean sounds, but familiar-enough that you CAN focus on the task at hand and miss half the episode to no great loss.
A great scene in this DS9 to pause on too. I always felt they had so much comedic potential left on the floor with Keiko being accepting of both Kira and Julian. When they realise they’d have a wonderful time in that cabin in the woods is my favourite scene, but this massage is a close second.
Nowadays of course there’s the polycule jokes like “this is my husband Miles and my girlfriend Keiko and my husband’s boyfriend Julian and his boyfriend Garak”. I guess they didn’t have big-enough brains for that in the 90s (I say tongue in cheek); but nevertheless I wish they hadn’t abandoned that tension they have in this episode.
@@kaitlyn__L Exactly why I noticed - I always have something familiar playing on a spare screen while working and have done so since the mid-90s, and DS9 has been played so often I have lost count.. but what an excellent story.
I think the social dynamics on DS9 would have been written still chained in what was socially acceptable in the 1990s, so they probably didn't want to risk alienating audiences by taking things "too far", but one of the outstanding things from DS9 is the characters compared to other shows in the franchise. Miles' bromance is utterly adorable, and the depth of everyone's relationships in general is something that shines throughout the show, including how personalities change and evolve. Life is grey, not black and white.
I'm an 65 year old engineer that programmed this IBM for quite a while in the late 80s. We purchased the serial modules, stripped the guts and designed an internal AtoD card with a 3 axis accelerometer that fit in the original case. This was sold to Boeing for an engineer to collect data on commercial, scheduled flights in the days when all devices must be off and under thr seat. This was a clandestine way for Boeing to collect data. Worked great.
22:59 that is a very realistic possibilty. LEDs in those days were not the blindingly bright ones of today. The standard red standby LED would be running at 10 to 20mA. It's not a whole lot, but it would have an actual measurable effect on battery life.
Great video. IBM actually experimented with TONS of innovative stuff but never really brought anything to the market for some reason. Also they were greedy as heck thus all the proprietary stuff.
Also, I hope that static screen on the later clarification part is on purpose because it really made me laugh. Surprised no top comment mentioned it.
My dad used to own this!!! I played with it all the time as a kid. He even had the thermal printer for it!!
I've still got my PC Convertible, and the serial/parallel module. When you started talking about the backlight, I was thinking "wait, I'm sure mine isn't backlit!" then you went on to explain the two screen options 🙂. The carrying handle is made of metal, and feels quite trustworthy to me.
you must be at the part in the DS9 story arch where Kira is carrying the O'Brien baby.... Such Sci-Fi antics.
With a sneaky “hey this is your fault!” scene to Bashir, since IRL it was their child.
I didn't realize this was such a long video about a machine that prints a letter at you and waits for you to type DIR until 3 minutes before it finished. Thanks for the video.
CRD Made The Longest Video Ever
Yes I don't mind if I want to watch something long. When technology reviewers is short.
@@LordMarcus There comes a point where you look at the length of such retrospectives and you decide just watching the actual show would be easier.
@@LordMarcus 10 hour alternative: "Sex Survey Results" by Lasagna Cat.
I really hope this is a compliment. ‘I don’t have time and/or can’t pay attention to long videos so I must impose my deficiencies on everyone else. All the OTHER humans on the planet MUST align with my irritatingly short attention span and I’m the most important person on Earth!’
Just don’t watch it. Or watch it IN PARTS like every other busy human who can’t binge watch the whole thing in one go.
There is this awesome feature where TH-cam stores your progress so you can resume watching the video at literally any time. To all the complainers ruining gloriously long, entertaining, and deep dive videos for the vast majority of the rest of us, be quiet and watch in parts or go watch the bazillion shitty 5 minute, fake information summary videos TH-cam is already packed full of. TH-cam even made a tab for people like you. Go to the shorts tab and don’t come back. Do. Not. Ruin. It. For. Us. Please.
I love these long videos. They keep me sane. I don’t have to constantly keep searching for a new and entertaining video during my grinding and seemingly endless 12+ hour shifts, cleaning up crap off the walls. This is my salvation. I’m a caregiver. Healthcare worker. If you want me to stay sane while I take care of your dying parents or relatives and continue to take good care of them while you cannot, do not ruin our beloved long video producing creators. I can’t touch the screen when I have on gloves with poop all over them.
All I ask is that creators like CRD are allowed, supported, and not harassed for creating long videos. I absolutely love these long videos!
If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for your time and reading my ventilation. Cheers to long videos. May they never die, lol.
@@leebee1100 I only read the first two sentences of your screed before I realized I was getting punked.
Things like you showing the band "a perfect circle" when talking about a perfect circle is the reasons why I keep rewatching all the videos here as well as being subbed to catch the new ones, the gags are just so perfectly executed and koRny
I love how insanely comprehensive this video is -- it's a REALLY excellent overview of the IBM 5140 and all of its bells and whistles.
I don't have an actual 5140, but I've had the monochrome IBM 5144 monitor as my second monitor on my PC for about 3 or 4 years now (using an HDMI2AV converter and some custom aspect ratio settings in the AMD control panel), and I freaking love using it with PuTTY when SSH'ing in to SDF or my home server. It's got a beautiful display, paired with decent contrast/brightness controls with an insanely nice (cast zinc?) base.
I do have a Tandy 1400FD, which is a similar portable machine, but the keyboard on it is near completely awful and I've only been able to get the built-in screen to work once for a short time after recapping the power supply. I think the fact that the IBM seems to work out of the box 40 years later might be a bit of a testament to its build quality, even if they did make a significant number of mistakes compared to other manufacturers.
In the mid 1980's I was selling computer and sold both the Jr and the Convertible. The Convertible came out on April 1, 1986. The magazine article you showed was July, which is about right as magazines were out 1-2 months before the published date back then, so the timing was about right, perhaps a month late, to match up.
it was IBM's first computer to ship with a 3.5 inch as a standard drive. A year later, the PS/2 line followed suite with the 3.5 as standard drives.
I always felt like the convertible recycled PC Jr components that they probably had a lot of after it failed, hence the similar expansion style and the monitor cable (plus using the PC Jr monitor by default). It might also explain the lack of better integration on these expansion cartridges as they might have been adapted from PC Jr.
I had a similar thought about the length, especially if you added the printer.
Thanks for the nostalgia trip.
I love the snap-on printer. Portable thermal printers were the bomb, I kinda wish someone would build a more modern one. Imagine how small they could make one today. I still use a Citizen PN-50 from the mid 90's (Epson LQ2550 emulation), I've used 7.2v RC-car NiMh packs to keep it working on the go, much like you did for the 5140.
Epson makes one thats kinda on the size of the 90s hp-300, with a battery
The one that ships with the ClockworkPi DevTerm kits looks pretty cool. The whole assembled thing gives off real TRS-80 Model 100 vibes, and they ship a few ARM versions as well as a RISC-V version. Even though I'm convinced it serves any practical purpose at all (because keyboard, screen and printer are TINY, and CPUs are slow) I almost want one anyway just as a piece of modern art.
@@lasskinn474 The Epson (and HP) mobile printers are HUMONGOUS (by at least 2x) compared to my nearly 30 year old Citizen (which also has a battery inside it!). www.acrpc.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0681.jpg
Great retrospective. I lived through all this time, but only saw many of these computers in magazine ads. I love the rigorous exploration!
Dude you’re the best. Thanks for the great content!
You could always show off things with TH-cam shorts if you don't have much to say about them.
This is my first time watching your channel, I appreciate the length of the video! You cover a lot.
Thanks for your video, they're always very interesting! Just a request: when you state the size or weight of something, can you also add the equivalent in metric units? Even by writing it on screen, it would be really useful for people who watch you outside US and are not familiar with the imperial system
+ 1 On that request! 👍
A good mental math trick to get close enough is just half any weight in pounds to get within 10% of the weight in kilos. When it comes to size measurements it’s a bit trickier but treat it as double and a half for inches, so for 12 inches double to 24 and had the half (6) for 30cm which is close enough.
yep pls
I just snapped up the green IBM monitor from eBay yesterday , now the wait to have it delivered!
If you want some more 640x200 action in something more useful in a modern sense, check out the NEC MobilePro (preferably the 780 or 900). I used one in high school, which made me the first person with a laptop. People thought I was crazy until they were buying my perfect biology notes and watching tiny videos in study hall.
Edit after finishing the video: Nah Dude, your presentation was top-notch as per usual. Was able to see the screen pretty well; except for...well, when no one would be able to. Excellent!
Great video! And great to see Gene's work mentioned! I got to meet Gene at Computer Reset where he volunteered most of the events building PC Jrs and helping people find their treasures.
That was a really great watch! So far you have done a great job of inspiring my research and tinkering into video and a great job of making me think "thats cool but is it really THAT cool?" Thanks CRD 😊
This was my first PC compatible computer, back in about 1990. Picked it up at an auction for £50.
From what I learned from watching this, mine was a Mk.1, with 512Kb RAM, and the Ser/Par add-on. It did have a lovely keyboard, but not much else positive to say about it.
I soon upgraded to a desktop computer with VGA and a hard disk.
Cheers!
The alarm TSR most likely sets a timer via the RTC which would trigger a hardware interrupt. That hardware interrupt line from the RTC is probably responsible for also waking up the machine. This resume thinf is very cool stuff for the time.
That’s assuming this XT-class machine even _had_ an RTC.
@@BrendonGreenNZL I was thinking that too, but I didn't see DOS asking to set the time and date on startup so I was making the assumption that it did... I wouldn't be surprised, because by this time IBM were already making machines with NiCad battery-backed RTCs. The 5140 most likely came with such a thing in there, and references I found online seem to indicate it came with a built-in RTC but I didn't dig far. My IBM machines from that era all came with horrible NiCad packs to power the RTC :)
Might not be an RTC like those were used to, but given it’s already battery backed, it’s likely something kept track of time while it was “off”
Fun story about "Dangerous Dave" by John Romero, published by Softdisk: Softdisk was where John Romero, John Carmack, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack worked before founding id software. They used Softdisk PCs (at night) to do a lot of their game programming. They also made games for Softdisk, which shipped them out regularly. Dangerous Dave made another appearance when John Carmack figured out how to make the background scroll (notice the background is static in your Dangerous Dave in this video). Scrolling backgrounds weren't a thing in PC gaming until Carmack figured it out. They tried to sell the idea to Nintendo by cloning Super Mario Bros 3's level 1-1 as a demo. It was called "Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement". Nintendo didn't bite, so they used the tech to make Commander Keen, which was id's first release and the game that gave them the income to create Wolfenstein 3d.
Consider a video showing the more unusual or simpler stuff, well worth the time.
TH-cam keeps recommending this video to me again and again.
And I just can't stop watching it.
This is the third time I'm watching this.
I need help
I had a Convertable along with the printer - which of course clipped on the back just like the expansion ports. It was thermal and came with an enclosure that stored a small roll of fax paper, so you could get a medium-rez, terribly curly printout. Since on mine, the roll was internal, it might have been even longer than the one you show.
i will never cease to be amazed by your ability to find the most interesting things to talk about that no one noticed or bothered to.
Back in the 80s I remember a lot of software coming with both 5.25" and 3.5" disks in the package, because of how long the transition from 5.25" to 3.5" took. I feel like it wasn't until the 90s when software would regularly come on just 3.5".
I remember order forms and stuff for shareware games often having a choice between which format you wanted.
That Miles O'brien pic was perfect
Super glad you are getting good use out of that monitor!
I like that Kira and Miles O'Brien made a cameo in your video cutaways. #LLAP
This is such an amazing video. I really did find it interesting, as you highlight the mindset or rational behind design decisions at the time and put them in context with other things going on. Its about more than the computer itself and thats why i like it so much.
This is the first of your videos to enter my life, and I love that you're like an alternate reality version of the character 'Peter Griffin', where he has his life together and are actually worthy of Lois. You're awesome!
Huh, I have one of those little IBM monitors but never really stopped to wonder what it was for. I also didn't know the filter was removable! Great little monitor, though, used to use it a lot for testing things just because of its size/weight. More recently I've connected it to a Video Floppy camera for some aesthetic photo nonsense.
Fun fact: IPL is still the term IBM uses for the process of rebooting its mainframes. It's slightly more complicated than a reboot, but that's the gist of what it's doing.
What could have inspired CRD to do such a long video on a niche product nobody remembers?
Ah, there we go.
I have never heard of your channel before but this video popped up and I figured why not watch it. I'm glad I did. None of this info is worth much to me in the greater scheme of things but I for some reason am glad I learned this. You really didn't have to apologize for the video length or editing it was all good. I am now a subscriber and look forward to more interesting content.
"How unhinged would you have to be to do something like that with a laptop?"
IBM: "Hold my beer"
It's incredible how such an interesting topic can make an hour and a half video go by so fast!
I had a DG One which my dad got when he worked at DG, they also had a screen upgrade which made it slightly less terrible, sadly long-gone.
Also, on the MDA+CGA thing, I believe a bunch of PC debuggers were built to have their interface on an MDA display for ease of use.
Yes, I remember Turbo Pascal had this feature (Turbo Debugger) to show the running program on one screen (CGA/EGA/VGA) and the registry/stack/data and other info on an MDA/Hercules mono display. Also I vaguely remember PSpice having a similar feature (maybe I am wrong), showing the program on MDA and running the simulation graph on CGA.
I actually took a IIc monitor to summer camp at Northwestern University one year so we could play console games. It generated some attention.
The Amstrad PPC had a supertwist 640×200 LCD with rectangle pixels to preserve aspect ratio.
Also, dual MDA+CGA setup was not uncommon with software development. Even Borland's debugger supported such a mode.
In spite of your own perception your video is well structured and informative. It might not be perfect but life is just like that.
Thank you for all your efforts.
You see a collection, I see alot of potential #shorts content 😆
Will continue to tell you that I think you’re wonderful and I adore your content, presentation of said content and how genuine you are. Thank you so much for your efforts and for just being alive, being you… As soon as I’m more financially able, I will happily and proudly become a patron. Again, thank you so dearly for being you.
I desperately want to read the deleted bits of the script, this was extremely cool. The laws of physics are what they are, and you have to keep to the PC standard if you want it to sell. So often the sales pitch of novel features in 80's PCs and software are too good to be true, the platform didn't lend itself to much more than what most users got. But sometimes IBM makes the resume feature ~15 years before ACPI was standardized, sometimes it isn't a kludge where they saved the memory and registers to floppy, sometimes, rarely, they actually did the thing.
Look, most of the things that you desperately wanted to buy out of the back of a magazine when you were a kid probably didn't work the way you would have wanted them to, but this channel seems to be trying to answer the question of 'but what if they did?' What if those bizarre moonshots hidden in the mundane actually kept their promises?
I love this final paragraph, it’s so true.
My favorite part of your videos is the context you bring to every feature of a device you're describing: you can clearly explain which parts of this laptop were bad, acceptable or top of the line for the time and have solid theories on how the manufacturer decided on those parts.
Uh-oh, the Elektronnika BK001 you showed as an example for an easter block machine - that was the first computer I ever touched and played with, back in 1987 or so. And to be peddy its a pdp-11 clone not zx spectrum.
Oh yeah, I recorded the narration and *then* had to find a suitable picture, and it turned out that all the actual spectrum clones had very poor photos.
I was just watching another of your videos when TH-cam recommended me this one and I sat there trying to figure out why I'd never seen this one before until I saw it was from today. Always glad to see a new CRD drop!
"How dare CRD assume I have nearly 90 minutes of time to watch a video about an obscure thing from decades ago!"
[appears in Action Button's westernized Boku no Natsuyasumi box art shirt]
Ah ha ha, you got me.
If you've got any other items using the "Space Age Modern" aesthetic, that's a whole video right there. Damn. That is a sexy phone.
Actually, programs like the App Selector where more useful than you would think. My dad started using computers around 1983 and stayed with DOS until about 1995, but to my knowledge he never ever used one single DOS command. I don't know how he did it on his first DOS-PC, which still had 2 diskette drives, but on the second one he had a simple batch-based program selector where you typed in a 2-digit number to access any program. So the PC would start up, go right to the program selector, and when exiting a program you would be back to the program selector again. So there was no DOS knowledge needed what so ever.
I was thinking most businessmen would vastly prefer a menu over typing in programs, even if it took longer to boot. Those format and copy commands seem really useful to a lay user too, since people often struggled with remembering the operand order.
Make a series "wow thats neat" and quickly cover a bunch of things you have that are just neat
i enjoy neat things
The display adapter wasn't the only thing they apparently borrowed from the IBM PCjr. The modem also sounds very similar to the one for the PCjr, and I was able to get Procomm to use it, although downloading binary data was ... interesting.
I have a Data General One, and it has the second best keyboard I've ever used on a laptop, the best being the IBM laptop you showed off (a friend of mine's father worked for IBM Boca and let us use it).
It wouldn’t happen to be the same person in the comments talking about getting one from Boca in 1990 I suppose?
It also occurred to me, they could’ve just used all the surplus parts. Connectors, modems, etc, to try and save costs. Might explain some of the larger chips in the expansion blocks too.
Dude I could listen to you talk about anything for any amount of time, you've got an excellent vocal presence
Great video! For the alarms in suspend mode thingy: it's probably an interrupt that wakes the CPU. I'm not totally sure, but I know micro-controllers often have the ability to put the processor to sleep only to wake up on an interrupt of some kind. Also, the Macintosh Portable also had static RAM. The next version of that machine changed to pseudo-static RAM, and replaced the display from reflective only to a back-light screen that was supposed to also be okay in bright light, but for me between the two I have, the reflective in a bright room gives the most pleasurable viewing experience for me.
With its 32 : 10 aspect ratio, it was the original ultra-wide - albeit not really that wide.
Just started the video and you mention how you have stuff that don't deserve a video but are still pretty neat. I'd like to see those items in the shorts format. The telephone segment was pretty much accidentally a TH-cam short. Keep it up
It really seems that they could have designed it to be stackable; they're already making design choices, not using (many) off-the-shelf parts. Remind me of chaining peripherals on a Commodore 64, that could get a bit stupid with modules extending to the right as far as the eye can see.
Great video kept me interested the whole time to the end and never skipped anything
CRD you could tell us who manufactured that telephone, its model number, the dates during which it was manufactured, maybe open it up and let us see how its internals are arranged, or even try to look into who designed it and what their thought process was, if it was part of a larger vision for similar capsule-like retractable devices etc...
It's called the Telstar, model 911/2911, manufactured by Western Electric, sold (or originally leased) by the Bell System/AT&T as part of the Design Line series of decorator telephones introduced in the 1970's at their Phone Center stores. The Telstar name was borrowed from the Telstar communications satellite series and it was meant to be a futuristic and modern looking option, and it and several other Design Line phones had the box with lid and retractile cord setup, seems they though everyone wanted to hide the phone when not in use
@@St0rmcrash the Telstar name comes up bizarrely everywhere. The classic football (“soccer ball”) design, such as the emoji uses ⚽️ is also called Telstar. Although in this case, it’s because the black pentagons were said to make it reminiscent of the actual satellite’s appearance, rather than merely trying to cash-in on the futurism of the name/concept of satellite comms. That said, it was one of the first modern synthetic balls as opposed to leather, so it WAS futuristic in that way as well.
@@kaitlyn__L @Stormcrash Holy cow that was beautiful. This is some CONTENT right here 🥰 actual expository essay material that sheds the light of context on a curious piece of history! Well done, both of you! Thank you for putting this forth! Now I can try to juxtapose its appearance against the other Design Line models, or look up if there are any sales records against which I can compare the Telstar 911/2911 to its contemporaries in the market at the time for some gauge of its success (or lack thereof if the case may be).
I can already envision a video similar to that of Regular Car Reviews where the presenter Brian "Mr. Regular" Reider weaves for the watcher/listener a narrative tapestry of the era and circumstances, and lightly illustrates a suggestion of the kind of people it was marketed toward and such...
@@Stonehawk I’m glad to have sparked your imagination! Yeah, the smoked acrylic, cylindrical/capsule-like shape and the name were all intended to appeal to forward-thinking folks who kept-up with science and technology.
Though, there was hardly anyone who didn’t know what Telstar was, it was about as famous as Sputnik! So it signals that futurism image, without being obscure/exclusive/gatekeepy about it.
I might compare to those futurism TV sets from the late 60s and early 70s. Everyone remembers the perfectly round orb ones, but there were a lot of pill and ellipse shaped ones too. And they frequently featured smoked-glass over the screen. Smoked glass or acrylic was just… all the rage!
Smoked glass persisted into the straight-lines, avocado and brown later-70s, but this “Telstar” phone design really screamed late 60s early 70s. (From some technical details too, but that’s just being a Western Electric and GPO phone nerd.) Honestly if they didn’t also sell the Telstar in bright orange, red, sky blue, and a few other shades, that’d be a real missed opportunity.
Edit; yep, looks like they only made it in black. Must’ve expected it to be in trendy offices and the like. Some of these places say late 70s rather than early or mid, so I guess it was too late for bright colours to be hip.
I use a split, tented ergonomic keyboard, but even I am jealous of that keyboard. The clacking sound alone is so satisfying!
Also, I love the idea of the expandable modules. I know they aren't very practical, but I think the physical expansion modules are very satisfying and retro. I can imagine an alternate universe where dozens or even hundreds of third-party expansion modules were released for this convertible pc, and someone had a twenty-foot-long computer!
You can override the alt-ctrl-del in sw so the 'harder' reset key combo is necessary.
...some modern hp laptops have a habit of getting stuck after a bios update needing to unplug the internal battery. Hard resetting that way is kind of a bother to do.
A family member’s HP Stream did that, but of course you couldn’t access the battery to power it off. HP wanted 80% the price of a new machine to do it 🙄 I’d offered to find a way myself but they weren’t interested in “taking the risk” - so they just bought a new machine, which I’m sure was HP’s intent.
@@kaitlyn__L well in my case waiting for x days for it to drain the battery would've "worked" as well. I didn't check if the usb ports were supplying power out to accelerate it
@@lasskinn474 perhaps it wasn’t quite the same error, in this case it never went to the BIOS screen after the update, and they’d tried it after a couple weeks to see if it was any different. It’s possible the self discharge just wasn’t high enough with the fanless design, weak Celeron, and 9 month old lithium. If it just got stuck in the middle of boot I would’ve definitely tried just leaving the screen backlight on to kill it.
Anyway, I’m still cheesed-off about that behaviour, so hearing it was common across other laptops felt slightly vindicating!
@@kaitlyn__L oh it didn't get stuck in middle of boot in my case either. It did the update and then went to reset and got stuck in that with screen off and all effectively appearing dead.
The irony is that if there was just something wrong with the bios theres a a built in bios rollback in it, its just the bios updaters reset routine that was broken for me
@@lasskinn474 okay, yeah, that perfectly matches what I experienced.
An irony is, they’d asked me to help them update it, because the disk was too full to download and install. I had to remove redundant system files and hidden cookies, because the Stream had such small eMMC (IIRC) flash. If I hadn’t done that, it would’ve never installed the BIOS update.
It installed the Win10 updates, which I spent literally hours babysitting it during. Afterward it showed the BIOS flashing screen, actually installed the first one, rebooted, went onto the second one, then never came back from a reboot. Backlight would never turn on, etc.
Of course on the phone they claimed it needed a new BIOS chip, but I was dubious and saw some people had success with removing the battery. But of course there was no access, like I said at first.
The fact HP must’ve known it was a systemic problem, as opposed to it just being something up with the cheapness of the Stream line, makes it even worse honestly. There’s no way they didn’t realise a bunch of their laptops were all behaving that same way. Yet they still had Windows Update automatically download and apply them.
I was at first surprised and astounded there was no watchdog or rollback or anything for that behaviour. Knowing there was, but just not triggered by this condition, seems almost even more convenient?
1:24:34 Heck of a still frame on the other monitor. Also, this didn't seem disjointed at all. Weirdly captivating if anything. I liked how your assistant's hands made a few cameos
I cannot watch an hour and a half long movie if you put a gun to my head but a 1:27:36 documentary of some stupid computer from the 80s is always my jam. TBH I wish I could have one of those dock setups for my current laptop; it's a heavy gaming laptop that I mostly use in a docked setup or in bed and plugging in and out all of the cables is a pain lol
Hey, love the content. I don't know if it fits your style, but to show off all those various gadgets, what about doing a list type of video?
Something like "10 gadgets from the 90s you've never heard of"
*THIS* is the 1985 IBM PC convertible and it is one of the strangest laptops ever made. It certainly is unusual in many ways and today I'm going to review it. First I'm going to show you all the quirks and features, then I'm going to give it a try, and finally I'll give it a DudeScore.
I read it in Doug’s voice from the first word! I’m glad it turned out to be right, if it was just an errant *this* that might’ve been embarrassing!
Love the quick flash of APC!
I have one of those Toshiba early laptops that I got when I volunteered at a thrift store, and it also has an alps full height keyboard. I'm not worried about my idea of ripping out the internals to make a modern PC on top of it because, well, Foone has 2 of them, so I don't think they're rare. Of course, if it works, I might keep it around as a novelty.
Foone has two of everything. I would not consider them the baseline. :)
@@Kumimono I wonder if they’re building an Ark for tech. Foone’s Ark, so they won’t be forgotten after a major disaster destroys all warehouses and museums
Been watching your videos for a few years now. Nice work
when i saw there were only 31 comments i figured id actually say that you are a bisexual icon and i have a huge celebrity crush on you :-P
Another note. I actually used this PC for hours writing 6809 assembly code on the planes going back and forth from Detroit to Seattle in the late 80s. I was a God on the plane (at least in my own mind). It was a great keyboard. I think the loud clicking keys either impressed or annoyed my fellow passengers. It didn't fit real well on the tray table! I think I still have some parallel modules at work in the archives!
Nice overview, it was worth it. this is no ordinary PC. The double-strike thing is something I somehow knew but never thought out, mind blown.
I'd say the printer having a stronger latch shows the reason it goes on first or sits to the side. The combined weight or perhaps increased leverage of the three modules requiring a better latch being the reason. As for the noise of the printer, it's waaaay quieter than a dot matrix.
I love the longer videos I wonder what topic could be good enough for a two and a half hour video