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
"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!
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.
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.
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 UA-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
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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".
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.
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.
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 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?
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
On the "sleep mode" front - I have a high-end IBM ThinkPad from the _late_ '90s that not only doesn't support sleep mode, it doesn't even have soft-power. Tell Windows to shut down, and you're met with the "It is now safe to turn off your computer" screen. Even if you tweak a registry entry to try to force it to software shut down instead of showing that screen, it just reboots instead of shutting down. To power it off, you HAVE to toggle the power switch. (Which is a "slider on a spring", not a hard on/off. But it acts as a hard on/off. Toggle in Windows, and instant power-off, no nice controlled shutdown.)
@@BrendonGreenNZL My favorite were some Dell Latitudes I bought in 2000 for the company I was IT purchasing manager for - brand new model, shipped with brand new Windows 2000. Apparently sleep mode was broken on W2k - screen would turn off, _fans_ would turn off, but system stayed on. Had two cook themselves to death in employee’s laptop bags the first week. One so hot the keyboard warped. I’m amazed no battery fires. Dell tried to claim it wasn’t covered under warranty. Had to escalate three levels up to get them to admit that a computer as shipped shouldn’t bake itself. (Apparently a read me text file in C:\drivers advised that sleep mode didn’t work on W2k and to shut down - that should have been a piece of paper the first thing you see when you open the box - or settings to shut down completely on lid-close.)
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.
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.
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.
In the video you say that there are lots of things you collect that don't deserve a full video, but i wonder if you could make a compilation thats kind of surface level, and just full of "wow thats neat" things, i would definitely watch it!
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.
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.
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 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
I wouldn't say the luggable was just a thing for a few months. The first commercial portable computer was the Osborn in 1981. It ran CP/M. What made the Compaq unique was that it was one of the first IBM compatibles that also was a portable in a form factor much like the Osborn. As LCD monitors progressed, battery life improved, and smaller storage mediums happened, there was also a period in the 80s in which you had an option of a "luggable" (a larger computer meant more to be a portable that you plug into a wall), or a laptop (which tended to have quite a few compromises in storage space and specs to be able to be small form factor to use on an airplane for 3 hours). It seems to me that IBM was trying to make some sort of hybrid system of smaller form factor computer and expandable components.
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.
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.
*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.
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 UA-cam short. Keep it up
As an Electronic/Computer Sys Engineer, I've always been fascinated by the impact that Lithium and Nickle Metal Hydroxide made to the mobile device industry,. Prior to the HP IPaq and the O3 phone, most extended use mobile computer devices (mobile phones, PDAs, calculators etc) used an LCD screen for the reason that displaying information didn't require a constant connection to the wall. That is to say, energy efficiency and advanced computer technology hasn't played nearly as great a role in mobile computing as has battery technology has for the every day consumer. The unsung hero.
I like how you get to the point and don't have some cringey ass intro. Keep up the good work CRD, one of these days I'll make it through all of your videos!
“Nothing to say about a PC”, well you proved yourself wrong there! I started watching this with a ho-hum type of attitude but then got *totally* fascinated! Fantastic vid mate. Keep them coming.
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!
I love the sound of your typing; you've got a really smooth, even rythm with consistency uninterrupted by errors (I can type same speed but leaving errors all over the place). One of the few Seriously useful things I learned in high school (think was in yr. 10 back in 1984) was touch-typing; back then was still mostly mainframes & all mechanical typewriters...me & one other were the ONLY guys in the whole class! And it was packed with girls all learning to be secretaries & doing prep for an exciting career in a typing pool (which still existed in Perth, West Australia back then...). We copped so much hassle frm the rest of the guys in our year, but I tell you what... it's made ALL the difference since! When I'm in the 'zone I can hammer out anything at 70+ wpm! I can't remember her name, but I thank my H.S. typing teacher frm the bottom of my heart! There's a topic you might consider looking into... ;~ ]
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.
Nice sneak-in of the band A Perfect Circle at 54:33. ...oh, and an IMPRESSIVE presentation of this 1980s underpowered Edsel! Facts presented clearly. I'll forget nothing. Thank you... and for the kitty shots!
I remember browsing some old PC magazines in the early 90s and seeing basic programs written out for people to manually type into their computer for essentially free software. I think it was pretty popular at the time
Awesome video! I chuckled a bit when you cut from the editing room where on the monitor was star trek DS9 paused with Kira Nerys on screen, then you switched to the video of yourself on the green monochrome monitor and it reminded me of an Orion man for a second.
15:21 PrtScr has an asterisk on the Fn-layer for use with the numpad! notice there's also a redundant period and slash, so you don't have to release the Fn key while typing on the numpad layer.
I like the PC videos because i see it as a portal viewpoint into the timeframe, contextualized in what features i has and what the hardware can do. yeah they all run Dos and type dir, but its the design and the hardware and the capabilities of them that I find interesting, as well as the history.
1:02:00, Fun fact. The lead on the original IBM PC, Don Estridge, died in an *horrible* airplane crash in August of 1985: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Don_Estridge en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines_Flight_191
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
Me every time I see a new CRD video drop: "You want me to spend an hour and a half on what??" Me every time I finish watching a new CRD video: "Excellent. No notes. Worth every minute." 😆
I think it's probably worth mentioning the Osborne 1 portable computer since it was from April 1981 and actually *predates* the IBM PC standard by 4 months.
I would suggest that the reason the printer needs to be clipped in first is because of that heavy duty latch. The other modules would be lighter and could easily hang off the printer and PC themselves. But if you install the other two first with the simple clip in system, and then try to add the printer as the last in the chain, the weight would be too much for the simple clip in modules to hold. Whereas the printer with the heavy duty latch would basically make the printer and PC one full solid unit. With the clip in modules attached to the end.
I used the IBM PC Convertible for my undergrad in CS back in the mid 80’s. Best damn keyboard ever. Programmed assembly language and C, plus wrote papers in MS Word. I even rebuilt the battery pack and later sold it for more than I paid for it! Can’t say that about laptops today.
I love the look of the side profile of this thing, well atleast the base unit, when closed. Reminds me so much of what we thought in the 1990s that video game consoles of the late 2000s & early 2010s were gonna look like.
Great video. I would have thought that the Epson HX-20 and its siblings would have warranted a place in your intro! Small screens, yes, but still widely considered to be the first laptops. Oh... and cassettes were awesome! I'm so glad I grew up in Europe in the 80s where we could use simple, cheap and easy to copy cassettes rather than having to deal with disks. Cassettes were a big part of the reason home computers took off in Europe way ahead of the US.
@@Blackadder75 In the UK, almost every household had a computer by the mid 80s because they were so cheap and accessible. You could argue that the US market was more technologically advanced, but in Europe it was way, way more accessible.
@@domramsey I am not convinced, I think that in the mid 80s the percentage of american households with a computer device was higher than in the UK. They were also much richer than us. You are probably right that in the UK it was a bit higher than on mainland Europe thanks to mr Sinclair
The PC Convertible was likely the last IBM system that has a full BIOS listing (included in the Technical Reference) - there are all kinds of details in there.
Great video. But I will say, with such a long video, I almost bailed pretty quickly. I'm glad I didn't though. I learned a lot! But the biggest thing I learned was about the feature (no spoilers) that IBM basically invented for all portable devices going forward (really not just laptops if you think about it). But you didn't mention this until the end of the video! Maybe tease it a bit more in the beginning? Or maybe you did tease it, and the video was so long, I already forgot. Either way, it was a great video! Very informative with just the right amount of added (attempts at) humor. :)
The original QTV teleprompter card could drive a VGA and an EGA monitor at the same time. The prompted text was on the VGA screen, and the computer program was on the EGA screen.
1:11:47 This part reminds me of the mean airport terminal agent lady in “Meet the Parents” 😂 she types at like 100wpm for a full 30 seconds just to see flight info.
This is my experience with IBM: The first succesfull hibernation feature I saw working was in an IBM Aptiva with Windows 95... but I couldn't reinstall the modem drivers without formatting the machine. The modem drivers were locked in PASSWORD ZIP FILE image in their recovery disk, which I BRUTEFORCED. Their pw is 'magic'. The Aptiva case was a mess with a riser card with all the ISA and pci slots and THIRTY-SIX SCREWS, but the manuals were FLAWLESS on how to find the hard-drive bolted under the cd-rom, install a 20GB unit, and FLASH THE BIOS with a floppy drive, so said BIOS could recognize the HDD and put a 2GB partition on it to boot win95. The most brilliant solutions mixed with the most batshit bonkers decisions, one after the other. It was a roller coaster. That same PC with a zipped image on the recovery CD had a 500MB DOS golfing game in a machine that shipped with 1.20GB HDD. Dementia doesn't begin to describe it.
A lot of the Aptiva line was contract made for IBM by Acer, so I wonder if what you saw was the mix of things IBM specified and where Acer was able to cut corners?
We had one of these when I was a kid. Father worked for ibm and ordered it when (actually before) they were for sale. Ours had the non backlit monochrome display. You had to have a desk lamp at a perfect angle over your shoulder to even see it. We had the model lpt, and cga display addon. Hooked it to the proper cga monitor and a 9 pin okidata printer. We upgraded it to 512 mb memory. The keyboard got flaky and the keyboard cost about the same as the unit did only a few years later. No 3.5hd drives yet let alone a hdd. Loading up dos from a diskette to then load your program. Sometimes you could leave dos in a drive and program into b. Some programs would not work this way.
I had one of these over 25 years ago and I used it to hold records using dBase, 2 I think. It was really to open it up in front of others back at a time when laptops were still a new concept. Wish I had hung onto it!
Hey bro, just Subbed. This is my 2nd episode this weekend, but remember i saw a vid of yours a while ago. First of all, the 1st video (not a long time ago, but yesterday) on the Hybrid RYOBI Solder Station. By the end before i Subbed, i was already (compared to other YT tech in small electronics & computers) definitely pleasantly surprised to find not only (even if not super detailed like the PCB for instance) hard specs & a moderate breakdown, but ALSO the commentary & speculation on reasons for why you found things the way they were (or WEREN'T lol) from-manufacturer and some related examples of similar things. 😊 And after all the"compliments" of the good features of it to start, when you opened the base and i saw that Power Supply, my jaw dropped! 😯😳 lol. That was SO nuts! And the first thing i thought about was the heat/thermal issue with how bulky and compact everything was in there. Just wild. But yeah, just wanted to say Thanks for the great & interesting vids & info! Definitely the unique type of channel I'll actually watch 👍 And i totally agree with you about the info/edutainment style. There's enough nonsense out there. I either want a HIGHLY detailed vid, something interesting but still related to electronics & electrical or DIY/maker stuff, or a Livestream on a multiple person, almost/ sometimes a call in show on any types of subjects I'm interested in ATM, and conducive to big speculation, fun & jokes, opinions, and BASED on actual real phenomena, or discoveries/ experiments/ breakthroughs, but above all just to discourse & listen to LIKE & open- minded ppl/friends in a welcoming environment, even if you disagree f fundamentally about certain things. So, hope you have a nice and safe holiday season, & Happy New Years! 👍 peace ✌ 🎅🎄
I run through the 5140 "Startup Diskette" on a video - capturing the output to be more visible. We also have all of the released Startup Diskettes for the 5140 (v1.00, 1.01, 1.02, and 1.03) at the 'Ardent-Tool'.
Very cool review. I recall when doing my internship using a small HP portable printer to print out legal documents. I liked the little monochrome with color add on printer so well, when I found one for sale, I purchased it. It now lays in a pile of crap in my back room. One of these days I may well dig it out and use it once again. Of course with todays wifi driver printer there isn't a lot of use for it any more. Perhaps I could take it along on trips to the city but I rarely need to print anything on such trips. I used to write short stories while sitting in Walmart parking lots. Lots of strange looking folks passing by that add spice to my writing.
I'm pretty sure the horizontal lines at 30:45 are underlines. Underline was a text attribute on MDA and Hercules video adapters. On CGA, EGA, and VGA, the bit that represented underline on MDA/Hercules (and apparently this display) was used for color, which is why some of the "colors" on that screen are rendered as underlines.
Oh, you're totally right. I had first tested this when I had the CMOS option for "show intensity as underline" disabled, but when I did it during shooting I forgot I'd turned that on. Good call.
Just to explain how TSRs used to work: By calling a specific DOS function the program would return to MS-DOS yet its memory would not be deallocated (well, the program itself passed how much memory was needed to be kept) and as the program would most likely hook up 1+ interrupt[s] even though DOS/other app was in control the interrupt handler would still be called. For the alarm itself the timer interrupt (IRQ0 == int 8) was expected to be called 18.2 times a second, all it had to do is check whether it's time to work and react accordingly. Most TSRs hooked up either IRQ0 (timer) or IRQ2 (keyboard, to check for a specific key press combo).
I replace a floppy with a 40M Seagate Hard drive... which was an insane amount of storage at the time. The keyboard was heavy (It was the cover to the PC) and I miss the mechanical "clicky" feel. I upgraded the memory to 1M... which I think was the max for the 8086 processor... I remember for every 64k memory you added you had to plug in 3 chips -- 2 for parity and the other for hardware bit checking. -- my model came with 512k standard and needed 24 legged push in chips to max it out. I don't remember what the tricks were -- but the extra memory wasn't automatically recognized by your programs. CArrying that around was good cardio,
A comment on Basic. In 1985 we got a Radio Shack Tandy 1200, upgraded to IBM PC XT, with 640K ram, 20MB hard drive taking up 2× 5.25" drive bays, and 2× 5.25" floppy drives on the other side. Monochrome green was the easiest monitor to look at word processing for hours, so we didn't have graphics. Books of text based Basic games sold like hot cakes. Kids across the country spent days hunting and pecking every letter of code to play the games in these books. Basic Star Trek, Dungeons & Dragons, Blackjack, and Othello, that I typed from books, got a ton of play, without a graphics card. The Commodore 64 was our 1985 graphics computer, which used Atari joysticks and ran on Basic. The coding learned there translated to the IBM, so that fueled Basic use too.
These machines sold in amazing numbers to fleet and accounting firms who did inventory audits to value companies for sale or loan. Those folks were real road warriors for the late 1980s. I also remember them being what car dealers had in the back office to submit loan paperwork. The resume on power off was an amazing feature in the 3rd world in the late 1980 when the power went off on schedule nightly. One of the early apps I do remember supporting on much more modern gear in the late 90s was software that supported a serial bar code reader. Those were still dos based and were excellent in their keyboard shortcuts. I also remember this machine and its guts was also the basis for a few IBM cash registers were first to full keyboards. The internals are more cash register than Toshiba portable. I am not sure, but this machine might have also been early Bloomberg supported gear. I later did IBM POS stations into the WIN95 era and knew that the rugged nature of IBM products was not for the home market, it was for the treatment they get in the grocery store checkout line. As I type this I notice I the IBM keyboard I am using an IBM branded keyboard that I have had since Y2K that matches the internals excluding the USB controller of the keyboards on all but the worst IBM designs. Still there is a better touch and feel IBM keyboard, but I got to work, not wake the neighbors and be on the phone at the same time.
The "L" shaped return key is a standard key cap shape. A hold over from the days of typewriters and early PCs. When laptops became smaller and started entering into the notebook size, palmtop size, and smaller there was increasingly less room for not only full sized keys but properly shaped and located keys. For awhile the number keys were a thing off to the side. That gave way to smaller keyboards on smaller portable PCs. Then came clip on numpads, then came clip on trackballs for your thumb to attach to those clip on numpads, then came clip on track pads to the front of the keyboards, and IBM's track point (eraser head looking thing) situated in the middle row of the QWERTY keyboard. Some companies used the DVORAK key layout, others came up with their own "ergonomic" non-standard key layouts, some used petal switches arranged around a hemispherical key cap that supposedly made typing faster but without risk of developing carpal tunnel injuries, some made split keyboard designs. I'm still trying to get used to that style of keyboard. I used to be a touch typist before having to switch to a split keyboard. Interesting the way you nitpick about the aspect ratio of the display for causing things to look squished. Why? Because nearly every modern high definition TV or monitor does the same thing. If you grew up with more modern technology then their forefathers are going to look weird to you. I grew up before home computers were a commonplace thing. So for me having to use a 16:9 aspect ratio is still off putting.
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 UA-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 UA-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
"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.
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.
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)
ua-cam.com/video/qJA8S3IpVlI/v-deo.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 ;)
The squeakiness of the display hinge is absolutely delightful.
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 UA-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
#WordStar was popular in portable word processors, if on microcassette 📼.
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
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
Thanks! Not just for this episode, but for all you do. You provide worthwhile historical perspective.
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.
What could have inspired CRD to do such a long video on a niche product nobody remembers?
Ah, there we go.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
UA-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 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 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.
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
On the "sleep mode" front - I have a high-end IBM ThinkPad from the _late_ '90s that not only doesn't support sleep mode, it doesn't even have soft-power. Tell Windows to shut down, and you're met with the "It is now safe to turn off your computer" screen. Even if you tweak a registry entry to try to force it to software shut down instead of showing that screen, it just reboots instead of shutting down. To power it off, you HAVE to toggle the power switch. (Which is a "slider on a spring", not a hard on/off. But it acts as a hard on/off. Toggle in Windows, and instant power-off, no nice controlled shutdown.)
APM and ACPI drivers were one of those things that were an absolute nightmare to get working correctly in that particular era.
@@BrendonGreenNZL My favorite were some Dell Latitudes I bought in 2000 for the company I was IT purchasing manager for - brand new model, shipped with brand new Windows 2000.
Apparently sleep mode was broken on W2k - screen would turn off, _fans_ would turn off, but system stayed on.
Had two cook themselves to death in employee’s laptop bags the first week. One so hot the keyboard warped. I’m amazed no battery fires.
Dell tried to claim it wasn’t covered under warranty. Had to escalate three levels up to get them to admit that a computer as shipped shouldn’t bake itself. (Apparently a read me text file in C:\drivers advised that sleep mode didn’t work on W2k and to shut down - that should have been a piece of paper the first thing you see when you open the box - or settings to shut down completely on lid-close.)
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.
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.
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.
In the video you say that there are lots of things you collect that don't deserve a full video, but i wonder if you could make a compilation thats kind of surface level, and just full of "wow thats neat" things, i would definitely watch it!
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.
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.
That's a really neat laptop. Like most IBM products, it clearly wasn't thought out very well, and is pretty goofy, but it's neat.
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 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
I wouldn't say the luggable was just a thing for a few months. The first commercial portable computer was the Osborn in 1981. It ran CP/M. What made the Compaq unique was that it was one of the first IBM compatibles that also was a portable in a form factor much like the Osborn. As LCD monitors progressed, battery life improved, and smaller storage mediums happened, there was also a period in the 80s in which you had an option of a "luggable" (a larger computer meant more to be a portable that you plug into a wall), or a laptop (which tended to have quite a few compromises in storage space and specs to be able to be small form factor to use on an airplane for 3 hours). It seems to me that IBM was trying to make some sort of hybrid system of smaller form factor computer and expandable components.
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.
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.
*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!
Wow I just watched a feature movie length documentary on an ibm brick 🤣
Quite interesting bits of history here, thanks!
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 UA-cam short. Keep it up
Dude I could listen to you talk about anything for any amount of time, you've got an excellent vocal presence
As an Electronic/Computer Sys Engineer, I've always been fascinated by the impact that Lithium and Nickle Metal Hydroxide made to the mobile device industry,. Prior to the HP IPaq and the O3 phone, most extended use mobile computer devices (mobile phones, PDAs, calculators etc) used an LCD screen for the reason that displaying information didn't require a constant connection to the wall.
That is to say, energy efficiency and advanced computer technology hasn't played nearly as great a role in mobile computing as has battery technology has for the every day consumer. The unsung hero.
I like how you get to the point and don't have some cringey ass intro. Keep up the good work CRD, one of these days I'll make it through all of your videos!
“Nothing to say about a PC”, well you proved yourself wrong there!
I started watching this with a ho-hum type of attitude but then got *totally* fascinated!
Fantastic vid mate. Keep them coming.
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!
I love the sound of your typing; you've got a really smooth, even rythm with consistency uninterrupted by errors (I can type same speed but leaving errors all over the place).
One of the few Seriously useful things I learned in high school (think was in yr. 10 back in 1984) was touch-typing; back then was still mostly mainframes & all mechanical typewriters...me & one other were the ONLY guys in the whole class! And it was packed with girls all learning to be secretaries & doing prep for an exciting career in a typing pool (which still existed in Perth, West Australia back then...).
We copped so much hassle frm the rest of the guys in our year, but I tell you what... it's made ALL the difference since! When I'm in the 'zone I can hammer out anything at 70+ wpm!
I can't remember her name, but I thank my H.S. typing teacher frm the bottom of my heart! There's a topic you might consider looking into... ;~ ]
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.
Nice sneak-in of the band A Perfect Circle at 54:33.
...oh, and an IMPRESSIVE presentation of this 1980s underpowered Edsel! Facts presented clearly. I'll forget nothing. Thank you... and for the kitty shots!
Very well done video, comprehensive, detailed and well researched. I loved it. PS: Lithium batteries also scare the crap out of me too.
I remember browsing some old PC magazines in the early 90s and seeing basic programs written out for people to manually type into their computer for essentially free software.
I think it was pretty popular at the time
Awesome video! I chuckled a bit when you cut from the editing room where on the monitor was star trek DS9 paused with Kira Nerys on screen, then you switched to the video of yourself on the green monochrome monitor and it reminded me of an Orion man for a second.
15:21 PrtScr has an asterisk on the Fn-layer for use with the numpad! notice there's also a redundant period and slash, so you don't have to release the Fn key while typing on the numpad layer.
I actually took a IIc monitor to summer camp at Northwestern University one year so we could play console games. It generated some attention.
I like the PC videos because i see it as a portal viewpoint into the timeframe, contextualized in what features i has and what the hardware can do. yeah they all run Dos and type dir, but its the design and the hardware and the capabilities of them that I find interesting, as well as the history.
1:02:00, Fun fact. The lead on the original IBM PC, Don Estridge, died in an *horrible* airplane crash in August of 1985:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Don_Estridge
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines_Flight_191
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
Me every time I see a new CRD video drop: "You want me to spend an hour and a half on what??"
Me every time I finish watching a new CRD video: "Excellent. No notes. Worth every minute."
😆
I think it's probably worth mentioning the Osborne 1 portable computer since it was from April 1981 and actually *predates* the IBM PC standard by 4 months.
I would suggest that the reason the printer needs to be clipped in first is because of that heavy duty latch. The other modules would be lighter and could easily hang off the printer and PC themselves. But if you install the other two first with the simple clip in system, and then try to add the printer as the last in the chain, the weight would be too much for the simple clip in modules to hold. Whereas the printer with the heavy duty latch would basically make the printer and PC one full solid unit. With the clip in modules attached to the end.
I used the IBM PC Convertible for my undergrad in CS back in the mid 80’s. Best damn keyboard ever. Programmed assembly language and C, plus wrote papers in MS Word. I even rebuilt the battery pack and later sold it for more than I paid for it! Can’t say that about laptops today.
I always had fun with playing with cameras and connecting them to exotic displays. Monochrome Cameras look really neat on Phosphorus screens.
really enjoyed this, the history of laptops is one of my curiosities
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
Excelent video once again, on a machine I never even saw in a store.
It's always a great day when CRD uploads.
I love the look of the side profile of this thing, well atleast the base unit, when closed. Reminds me so much of what we thought in the 1990s that video game consoles of the late 2000s & early 2010s were gonna look like.
Great video. I would have thought that the Epson HX-20 and its siblings would have warranted a place in your intro! Small screens, yes, but still widely considered to be the first laptops.
Oh... and cassettes were awesome! I'm so glad I grew up in Europe in the 80s where we could use simple, cheap and easy to copy cassettes rather than having to deal with disks. Cassettes were a big part of the reason home computers took off in Europe way ahead of the US.
I was only talking about *PC-compatible* laptops, so I didn't include those.
@@CathodeRayDude Yes that's my point.
hm, I am european too, but let's be real, the USA was way ahead of us in the computer market, home or not, in the 70s and 80s
@@Blackadder75 In the UK, almost every household had a computer by the mid 80s because they were so cheap and accessible. You could argue that the US market was more technologically advanced, but in Europe it was way, way more accessible.
@@domramsey I am not convinced, I think that in the mid 80s the percentage of american households with a computer device was higher than in the UK. They were also much richer than us. You are probably right that in the UK it was a bit higher than on mainland Europe thanks to mr Sinclair
That Miles O'brien pic was perfect
Great video, as usual. And thank you for cluing me in to the fact that the A.B. Boku No Natsuyasuami tee exists!
you sir, are a collector!
(In denial)
Edit: Great video dude I love how long these are. it's great to leave half way to continue later on!
The PC Convertible was likely the last IBM system that has a full BIOS listing (included in the Technical Reference) - there are all kinds of details in there.
Great video. But I will say, with such a long video, I almost bailed pretty quickly. I'm glad I didn't though. I learned a lot! But the biggest thing I learned was about the feature (no spoilers) that IBM basically invented for all portable devices going forward (really not just laptops if you think about it). But you didn't mention this until the end of the video! Maybe tease it a bit more in the beginning? Or maybe you did tease it, and the video was so long, I already forgot. Either way, it was a great video! Very informative with just the right amount of added (attempts at) humor. :)
The original QTV teleprompter card could drive a VGA and an EGA monitor at the same time. The prompted text was on the VGA screen, and the computer program was on the EGA screen.
1:11:47 This part reminds me of the mean airport terminal agent lady in “Meet the Parents” 😂 she types at like 100wpm for a full 30 seconds just to see flight info.
Oh, a Telstar phone! Very 70's future design. I wanted one as a kid but never got one.
This is my experience with IBM:
The first succesfull hibernation feature I saw working was in an IBM Aptiva with Windows 95... but I couldn't reinstall the modem drivers without formatting the machine. The modem drivers were locked in PASSWORD ZIP FILE image in their recovery disk, which I BRUTEFORCED. Their pw is 'magic'.
The Aptiva case was a mess with a riser card with all the ISA and pci slots and THIRTY-SIX SCREWS, but the manuals were FLAWLESS on how to find the hard-drive bolted under the cd-rom, install a 20GB unit, and FLASH THE BIOS with a floppy drive, so said BIOS could recognize the HDD and put a 2GB partition on it to boot win95.
The most brilliant solutions mixed with the most batshit bonkers decisions, one after the other. It was a roller coaster. That same PC with a zipped image on the recovery CD had a 500MB DOS golfing game in a machine that shipped with 1.20GB HDD. Dementia doesn't begin to describe it.
A lot of the Aptiva line was contract made for IBM by Acer, so I wonder if what you saw was the mix of things IBM specified and where Acer was able to cut corners?
We had one of these when I was a kid. Father worked for ibm and ordered it when (actually before) they were for sale. Ours had the non backlit monochrome display. You had to have a desk lamp at a perfect angle over your shoulder to even see it. We had the model lpt, and cga display addon. Hooked it to the proper cga monitor and a 9 pin okidata printer. We upgraded it to 512 mb memory. The keyboard got flaky and the keyboard cost about the same as the unit did only a few years later. No 3.5hd drives yet let alone a hdd. Loading up dos from a diskette to then load your program. Sometimes you could leave dos in a drive and program into b. Some programs would not work this way.
I'm actually surprised that the graphics expansion port device didn't plug into the place where the swappable monitor went.
Inserting the Perfect Circle band picture every time you said it was hilarious.
Love your show, The phone you showed was made for cars in the late 1970's early 1980's.
I had one of these over 25 years ago and I used it to hold records using dBase, 2 I think.
It was really to open it up in front of others back at a time when laptops were still a new concept.
Wish I had hung onto it!
Love your vocab mate, nice writing
Hey bro, just Subbed. This is my 2nd episode this weekend, but remember i saw a vid of yours a while ago.
First of all, the 1st video (not a long time ago, but yesterday) on the Hybrid RYOBI Solder Station. By the end before i Subbed, i was already (compared to other YT tech in small electronics & computers) definitely pleasantly surprised to find not only (even if not super detailed like the PCB for instance) hard specs & a moderate breakdown, but ALSO the commentary & speculation on reasons for why you found things the way they were (or WEREN'T lol) from-manufacturer and some related examples of similar things. 😊 And after all the"compliments" of the good features of it to start, when you opened the base and i saw that Power Supply, my jaw dropped! 😯😳 lol. That was SO nuts! And the first thing i thought about was the heat/thermal issue with how bulky and compact everything was in there. Just wild.
But yeah, just wanted to say Thanks for the great & interesting vids & info! Definitely the unique type of channel I'll actually watch 👍 And i totally agree with you about the info/edutainment style. There's enough nonsense out there. I either want a HIGHLY detailed vid, something interesting but still related to electronics & electrical or DIY/maker stuff, or a Livestream on a multiple person, almost/ sometimes a call in show on any types of subjects I'm interested in ATM, and conducive to big speculation, fun & jokes, opinions, and BASED on actual real phenomena, or discoveries/ experiments/ breakthroughs, but above all just to discourse & listen to LIKE & open- minded ppl/friends in a welcoming environment, even if you disagree f fundamentally about certain things.
So, hope you have a nice and safe holiday season, & Happy New Years! 👍 peace ✌ 🎅🎄
This is my new favourite channel
I run through the 5140 "Startup Diskette" on a video - capturing the output to be more visible. We also have all of the released Startup Diskettes for the 5140 (v1.00, 1.01, 1.02, and 1.03) at the 'Ardent-Tool'.
Very cool review. I recall when doing my internship using a small HP portable printer to print out legal documents. I liked the little monochrome with color add on printer so well, when I found one for sale, I purchased it. It now lays in a pile of crap in my back room. One of these days I may well dig it out and use it once again. Of course with todays wifi driver printer there isn't a lot of use for it any more. Perhaps I could take it along on trips to the city but I rarely need to print anything on such trips. I used to write short stories while sitting in Walmart parking lots. Lots of strange looking folks passing by that add spice to my writing.
Gravis reminds me of someone I would have been friends with back in the day. One of the draws of his videos.
Cool video I split watched it because I had to get to work.
But came back to it because it was really interesting.
I'm pretty sure the horizontal lines at 30:45 are underlines. Underline was a text attribute on MDA and Hercules video adapters. On CGA, EGA, and VGA, the bit that represented underline on MDA/Hercules (and apparently this display) was used for color, which is why some of the "colors" on that screen are rendered as underlines.
Oh, you're totally right. I had first tested this when I had the CMOS option for "show intensity as underline" disabled, but when I did it during shooting I forgot I'd turned that on. Good call.
Oh boy, another 1,5 hour video.... But I like it! For some reason you always know how to capture my attention, great work!
Just to explain how TSRs used to work:
By calling a specific DOS function the program would return to MS-DOS yet its memory would not be deallocated (well, the program itself passed how much memory was needed to be kept) and as the program would most likely hook up 1+ interrupt[s] even though DOS/other app was in control the interrupt handler would still be called. For the alarm itself the timer interrupt (IRQ0 == int 8) was expected to be called 18.2 times a second, all it had to do is check whether it's time to work and react accordingly.
Most TSRs hooked up either IRQ0 (timer) or IRQ2 (keyboard, to check for a specific key press combo).
I had the luggeable! I bought one of these from a friend for $100 with the printer. Had two floppies. Nice PC to play around with.
I replace a floppy with a 40M Seagate Hard drive... which was an insane amount of storage at the time. The keyboard was heavy (It was the cover to the PC) and I miss the mechanical "clicky" feel. I upgraded the memory to 1M... which I think was the max for the 8086 processor... I remember for every 64k memory you added you had to plug in 3 chips -- 2 for parity and the other for hardware bit checking. -- my model came with 512k standard and needed 24 legged push in chips to max it out. I don't remember what the tricks were -- but the extra memory wasn't automatically recognized by your programs. CArrying that around was good cardio,
A comment on Basic.
In 1985 we got a Radio Shack Tandy 1200, upgraded to IBM PC XT, with 640K ram, 20MB hard drive taking up 2× 5.25" drive bays, and 2× 5.25" floppy drives on the other side. Monochrome green was the easiest monitor to look at word processing for hours, so we didn't have graphics. Books of text based Basic games sold like hot cakes. Kids across the country spent days hunting and pecking every letter of code to play the games in these books. Basic Star Trek, Dungeons & Dragons, Blackjack, and Othello, that I typed from books, got a ton of play, without a graphics card.
The Commodore 64 was our 1985 graphics computer, which used Atari joysticks and ran on Basic. The coding learned there translated to the IBM, so that fueled Basic use too.
These machines sold in amazing numbers to fleet and accounting firms who did inventory audits to value companies for sale or loan. Those folks were real road warriors for the late 1980s. I also remember them being what car dealers had in the back office to submit loan paperwork. The resume on power off was an amazing feature in the 3rd world in the late 1980 when the power went off on schedule nightly. One of the early apps I do remember supporting on much more modern gear in the late 90s was software that supported a serial bar code reader. Those were still dos based and were excellent in their keyboard shortcuts.
I also remember this machine and its guts was also the basis for a few IBM cash registers were first to full keyboards. The internals are more cash register than Toshiba portable. I am not sure, but this machine might have also been early Bloomberg supported gear. I later did IBM POS stations into the WIN95 era and knew that the rugged nature of IBM products was not for the home market, it was for the treatment they get in the grocery store checkout line. As I type this I notice I the IBM keyboard I am using an IBM branded keyboard that I have had since Y2K that matches the internals excluding the USB controller of the keyboards on all but the worst IBM designs. Still there is a better touch and feel IBM keyboard, but I got to work, not wake the neighbors and be on the phone at the same time.
The "L" shaped return key is a standard key cap shape. A hold over from the days of typewriters and early PCs. When laptops became smaller and started entering into the notebook size, palmtop size, and smaller there was increasingly less room for not only full sized keys but properly shaped and located keys. For awhile the number keys were a thing off to the side. That gave way to smaller keyboards on smaller portable PCs. Then came clip on numpads, then came clip on trackballs for your thumb to attach to those clip on numpads, then came clip on track pads to the front of the keyboards, and IBM's track point (eraser head looking thing) situated in the middle row of the QWERTY keyboard. Some companies used the DVORAK key layout, others came up with their own "ergonomic" non-standard key layouts, some used petal switches arranged around a hemispherical key cap that supposedly made typing faster but without risk of developing carpal tunnel injuries, some made split keyboard designs. I'm still trying to get used to that style of keyboard. I used to be a touch typist before having to switch to a split keyboard.
Interesting the way you nitpick about the aspect ratio of the display for causing things to look squished. Why? Because nearly every modern high definition TV or monitor does the same thing. If you grew up with more modern technology then their forefathers are going to look weird to you. I grew up before home computers were a commonplace thing. So for me having to use a 16:9 aspect ratio is still off putting.
your editing room looks cozy