 This is my IBM PC5140 convertible, which dates from about 1986. It's IBM's first true laptop, with an internal NiCAD battery lasting a few hours. It's got 256k of RAM, two floppy drives, no hard drive, and weighs about six kilos. This is one of the first generation of PC laptops, along with the K-Pro 2000 and the Toshiba T1100. And it's interesting because nobody really knew what personal computers were for back then. Let me demonstrate. Imagine that your new computer has just arrived. What do you get for your 2000 dollars, the modern equivalent of about 5000? Well, you get a proper technical reference guide, containing a printout of the BIOS source code and a complete hardware reference. You get DOS and a DOS reference. You also get this user manual. And in this, there are a couple of floppy disks. This one is the portable application suite. This software is supposed to demonstrate the power and flexibility of your new machine. So let's try it out. So even though the internal screen can be filmed, it's very difficult to do so allegedly. So instead, I'm just going to capture it remotely and composite the footage in. Unfortunately, my capture card is composite video and it just doesn't do color very well, which is why the image is fairly smeary. We can work that round that later for a bit, but for now, bear with me. So I've turned the machine on and booted it, and it's now waiting for a system disk. So I shall insert my original startup disk, press F1 to boot, and we'll see what happens. So this is what you are greeted with as a new user of the machine. Exploring is a documentation and a quick demo of what it can do. Software setup will allow you to install the system software on another disk, which I'll do in a moment. Diagnostics is the hardware diagnostic suite. It's not really useful without one of the technical guides, so I'm not going to bother with that. For now, let's have a quick look at the demo, shall we? Because this is the first thing you're obviously going to do. Yes, floppy disks are this slow. Even by 1986 standards, that wasn't very impressive. So what this is, is effectively a PowerPoint presentation explaining everything you need to know about a computer. Right now it's explaining how to use menus, complete with animations. And these pages are not skippable, so I shall just skim forwards through to the main menu. System overview basically tells you to read the documentation. The keyboard tells you how to work a keyboard, and in particular, it's quite interesting because it explains that this is a computer keyboard, not a typewriter keyboard. And typewriter keyboards and computer keyboards are not the same. Which again, I shall just skim over. None of this is terribly interesting other than historical wise. If you really care, pause the video and read the text. The rest of the menus explain how to use the software suite and the floppy disk, which I'm about to demonstrate. So I'll just ignore this completely and go back to the main menu. Very slowly. It's actually just rebooted the machine, and it is now complaining because I haven't set the system clock. So we reboot back to the main menu. We want to install the software onto my other disk, so I pick software setup, which is also incredibly slow. I'm pretty sure that this is just written as a .DOS batch file. So we insert a new disk into Drive B. We press Enter to begin, and it starts the installation. This takes about three minutes. I'm just going to skip over it. I should add that this is copying about 700 kilobytes of data. All right, the installation is now complete. There's another stage we can do which involves installing DOS onto the disk as well. This machine did come with DOS, though the original system disk is in fact missing for a mine, so I have a downloaded copy instead, which doesn't work with this. So I'm just going to ignore that for now. So the system disk now goes back into secure storage on my desk. We insert the newly installed application disk, we reboot, and we get to see what all the fuss is about. I still haven't set the clock. And here we are. This is the main menu of the IBM application suite for the PC convertible. The very first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go into the tools menu and go into the system profile program because I need to both set the clock and also, as you can tell, I need to tell it not to use a color screen because color just doesn't work with the capture card. So we set CRT, black and white. The date in month, day, year is... Month goes first because this is American 03 2019. Which, bizarrely, it actually accepts. The time is 1638. Everything else looks good. This model has, in fact, been upgraded from the original 256K to 640, which is nice because that means I can run a lot more software, save and exit, and we go back to the main menu. So what do we have here? We've got four main tools. Notewriter, schedule, phone list and calculator. Inside the tools menu is the system profile command that you just saw, which is just the BIOS configuration. We've got copy, which copies files, F5 arrays, which erases files, disk copy, which copies disks, and directory. What does directory do, you might think? It runs the DOS DIR command. Now, this is moderately interesting because these days, when you build a set of software like this, you would base it around a file manager. Back then, they weren't as aware that files were where you live when working a computer. You spend all your time staring at files, you do things with files, you open files. Files are how you think about how the machine works. Instead, they think of applications and actually managing the data that the applications use was very much an afterthought. So just looking at the directory is hidden in a couple of submenus. Likewise, F4, F5 and F6 copy arrays and disk copy are equally tucked away. Help is just a small explanation of what the various tools do. Interestingly, there are actually more here than appear on the menu, such as F3 set F keys does not actually appear on this at all. You only get that if you install DOS onto the disk as well, but the help tool doesn't know about it. So let's try out some of the actual programs, shall we? Calculator sounds simple. It looks like a calculator. 1 plus, except typing a plus is not actually the addition operator. Instead, the addition operator is the F2 key. And for some reason that seems to come out as 4, which is different. Let's try that one again. 1 plus 1. Ah, no, it is 2. I was just looking at the wrong place in the display. The very fuzzy display is not helping. We've got basic set of tools all on function keys. The reason why it doesn't use the normal operators is because you can also use these keys as a numeric pad. It is, in fact, an incredibly simple and not particularly useful calculator. I mean, it's only even got eight significant figures. Can we do... Oh yes, we need to reset it but we can type anything else. That would be this one. Not this one. Escape. Yes. We do actually get decimal places, which is nice and floating point. It's a completely boring calculator. But they felt that this was important enough to use as one of their key demo applications because doing basic arithmetic on a computer was exciting because it was done on a computer. So back to the main menu. We've got note writer, schedule and phone list. Let's try note writer. Note writer is essentially baby's first word processor. We can type some text. Seems to look good so far. The keyboard for the PC convertible was slammed in all the reviews. I think it's quite nice. There is one minor nitpick which is that when you press a key which you probably can't hear with this microphone the speaker goes click. It is possible to turn this off but it's an interesting design choice. There obviously expect that people are used to the buckling spring keyboards of things like the Model M and the Model F and wanted to reproduce the same noise but did so very badly. Anyway, let us insert some more text. Well that's behaved a little bit oddly because it doesn't automatically reformat paragraphs. Instead you use the F6 adjust command for that which just reflows the text. This is how a lot of early word processors used to work simply because reflowing text was expensive but this machine has plenty of power to do this so I'm not quite sure why they did that. So add some more text. Yep, it is a word processor. But it's also a word processor that thinks it's a typewriter so I can actually curse it back into here and just type. Of course if I press the reflow key it reflows it against the margins. We can adjust the margins. So we can change the margins to 540, 50 even. So now if I reflow it does it. There are no rulers. There is no text style. It is just plain text when you save this as a file which I can do with F3. It just saves it as a plain text ASCII file. If you want to have different margins for different pieces of text you have to manually adjust the margins yourself if you want to be able to reflow them. There's simple block operations so that I can say that I want to delete text and I move down to the bottom and then I press F7 for block again and it deletes it. It's got simple tabs. If I had the printer attached I could print it. Let's save that again. It has a very useful DIR command which just lists the contents of the disk although I saved it as a text file rather than an NW notewriter file so the default filter didn't spot it. There we go. And yes, it starts DIR again running in a shell. Yep, it is a very simple word processor. The only feature which I have yet to demonstrate is F5 Clear which just clears. That is it. That is all this does. Oh, there's some help. Not a lot of help. That is it. Literally there is nothing more I can tell you about this program. What else do we have? We've got the phone list which as you expect is a very simple telephone book. When I say simple, I mean very, very simple. I can enter some text here and if this application looks rather familiar this is because it's quite obviously just a text file using the notewriter engine. It's like I can just go in and edit the headers for no apparent reason. And it has WordWrap which is a bit problematic because it expects everything in the left hand column to be a name. So if I go to find yes, I do want to save this so we write the telephone list back to disk and I can search for say foxes and it locates the fox entry. I can locate the ardvark. I can also locate the person even though that field is not actually a name at all. And you can see that it's sorted by the first column so person appears right at the bottom of the list. I can just erase it, save again and here we have our two telephone entries. And again, that is all the features. Oh, apart from dial which uses the built-in modem to phone the number. I am not entirely sure how you're supposed to talk to them. I can only assume that you have a telephone as well. It also has failed to find the phone number. There's some wrinkle about the format of the telephone numbers this application expects. They don't understand. I mean, it's not like I've looked at the enormous manual or anything. So yes, these are all the features. That is it. And the last tool is the schedule planner. Now, I have a professional interest in this because I actually do calendars for a living. So I'm going to create a new database. We put it in Drive A. Okay. Here we are. This is the schedule planner. So I can make an appointment. Say here, I wish to, you know, like everybody does. It's all freeform text. So, you know, what do you want to do after you've brought about the end of the world? Have tea. Oops, that is in fact spelled incorrectly. We can use, we can search some more lines. If we want to add times that aren't on the list, we can simply type them in. And we can skip to other days quite slowly because it's all happening on floppy disk. It's got week and month views. So this is the week. We can tell it to show openings rather than appointments. So it's Sunday today. You can see that I'm busy up until half past four. There's a month view as well. So I have a meeting here. It's all year 2000 compliant, which is nice. There are some settings. You can set between American format and British format, but you can't set it to international format with the year first, probably because it hadn't been invented at this point. You can make it 24 hours. You can set your working hours. So like who gets up at eight o'clock? Let's set this as something much more reasonable. Half hour interval, set four and finished. And let's go back to the day view. And notice that this hasn't actually updated this day. If I go to a different day, it has because each day's appointment is stored as a simple flat text file. And because I've edited this day, changing any of the settings in the profile hasn't actually done anything. So I am now stuck with AM and PM times and getting up at eight o'clock until I clear all the entries from the day. There's also alarms and reminders which don't appear to work or release. Don't appear to do anything particularly obvious. I think what this is all about is when you're running it off the internal battery, it will wake the machine up and make a noise to annoy you. But I actually have the battery unplugged because it's a 33-year-old battery and it's probably completely wrecked. So just going to ignore that. And yeah, that is the calendar. And those are all the applications. There is one other neat trick which has got up its sleeve which I was actually slightly surprised by which is that if I load a file and yes, I have to remember my file name. That wasn't it. D-I-R. Test.text which is that if I'm in the middle of something I can do function escape and hotspot back to the main menu and you can see that Note Writer is highlighted. This allows me to flip back out and go into a different application. This has very primitive multitasking. Now, I can't swap back again. You only get one backgrounded application. But still, it's a rather neat feature. I wasn't expecting it to be something quite so crude. But yes, that is all the features literally of the demo suite of applications. There is nothing else I can demonstrate to you here. There is nothing else to see. Now, this is particularly interesting because this is what they chose to put on their demo disk. This is the set of software that they thought would be both a good demonstration of the power of the machine and also a genuinely useful application suite for people using this thing. They were actually expecting people to use this stuff. Obviously, anybody who wanted to do sophisticated work would simply install WordStar or WordPerfect on a floppy disk and run it under DOS. But nevertheless, they did actually expect people to use this stuff which brings me back to my earlier point in that people did not really know what computers were for back then. This was one of the first machines to make the jump from a purely business machine that lived on a desk that you had formal training and how to use to a personal machine that you took with you. We've had 33 years since this thing came out to learn what computers were for and what you could do with them. This is one of the very first steps when they were thinking what actually will people who are traveling with one of these things actually want to do with the machine? And what do travelers do? They write notes, they keep a calendar, all in a paper file of fax. They have a phone number list, so they try to reproduce that. And they did so in an incredibly simple and crude manner which these days you could knock up in a couple of hours in any random programming language. Back then it was a big deal. And this is one of the things that really interests me about old machines and particularly the early 80 machines is they were still trying to get a grasp of just what this new technology was for. And this software, simple and crude though it is, was slightly useful. I don't imagine that anybody really used it. They were intending this to be used. I mean, there are software updates. This is version 1.02. It's been patched to 1.03. They produce bug fixes. But it's still an important first step towards the ubiquitous computing we have these days. Our mobile phones are a direct descendant of this machine and this disk. Hardly anybody I know these days actually remembers phone numbers. They all use like the phone list application. Although possibly not with a floppy disk. Anyway, here is an early machine. Here is early software. I hope you found this interesting. Oh, yes, special bonus segment. What do you get if you boot one of these machines with no disk in the drive? On a modern machine, you just get an error message. But on this one, it's a little bit different because what you get is basic in ROM. Let me just put that into monochrome mode so you can actually see what's on the screen. This is actually a proper copy of Microsoft basic. It works just the way you would expect it to do, although not particularly quickly. This was originally intended for the original IBM PC with the external cassette player. And it does still think that there is a cassette player attached. However, as this machine does not have any of the cassette player hardware, you cannot actually load and save files. No, you can't use floppy disks. So even though basic is here, it is completely and utterly useless. Go figure.