- IBM 5110
The IBM 5110 Portable Computer was the successor of the
IBM 5100 Portable Computer.Three variations of the IBM 5110 were built:
* IBM 5110 Model 1 (with a built-inQIC DC300 tape drive of 204 kB).
* IBM 5110 Model 2 (without the QIC tape drive).
* IBM 5110 Model 3 - also designated as theIBM 5120 (with two built-in 8inch 1.2 MBfloppy disk drives).The IBM 5110 was announced in January
1978 (3 years after the introduction of the IBM 5100). Its main differences were support for more I/O devices (floppy disk drives,IEEE-488 ,RS232 , ...) and acharacter set (EBCDIC) which was compatible with otherIBM machines. These improvements made it partially incompatible with the IBM 5100.The 5110 featured the same housing as the 5100 (although the colors were different), which contained a
central processing unit , a keyboard and a 1,024-character display screen. Main memory held 16, 32, 48 or 64KiB ofdata , depending on the unit. Offering eithermagnetic tape or diskette storage, the Model 1 could store as much as 204,000 bytes of information per tape cartridge or 1.2 million bytes on a single diskette; the Model 2 allowed only diskette storage. Up to two IBM 5114 diskette units, each housing a maximum of two diskette drives, could be attached to the 5110 for a total online diskette capacity of 4.8 million bytes. The IBM 5110 Model 3 allowed only one external IBM 5114 diskette unit.An IBM 5103 printer and an external IBM 5106 auxiliary tape unit (Model 1 only) were available as options.
Citing the easy use of his new system, Jeff Grube, vice president of
Punxsutawney Electric Repair (who received the first IBM 5110 onFebruary 2 ,1978 ), said: "If you can type and use a hand-held calculator, you have all the skills necessary to operate a 5110."5110 Software
The 5110, designed by the Global Software Development team at Rochester, was aimed fairly and squarely at GSD's traditional commercial market. Perhaps the most significant factor was that this machine took only 90 days from conception to production. It achieved this miraculously short timescale under the management of Bill Synes, who - as a member of Bill Lowe's taskforce - later did much the same for the
IBM PC . As a business system, it came bundled with accounting software for a small business.Model 3
The IBM 5110 Model 3 (also known as the
IBM 5120 Computer System) was the desktop version of the 5110.The 5110 was withdrawn from marketing in March 1982.
ee also
*
IBM
* IBM 5100 Portable Computer
* IBM 5120 Computing System
*Personal computer
*John Titor References
David Mercer, "IBM: How the World's Most Successful Corporation is Managed", Kogan Page 1987 [http://futureobservatory.dyndns.org/2013.htm]
External links
* [http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/ibm/5100/ IBM 5100 Portable Computer]
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