IBM Portable Personal Computer

From: Sam Ismail <dastar_at_wco.com>
Date: Sat Jan 24 23:02:16 1998

On Sat, 24 Jan 1998, Cliff Gregory wrote:

> I don't know, Sam, but as one who does a bit of IBM collecting, there seems
> to be many more 5140s floating around out there than the 5155s. I have a
> perfect 5140 in my collection, but the 5155 has eluded me (so far).

Hmmm...what's a 5140?

The one I happened upon is in great condition. A little dirty, but
nothing a simple cleaning won't undo. One of the flip-down keyboard stems
is broken off, but other than that it is cosmetically perfect. I believe
I may be missing the back cover, if this system did in fact have one that
slips over the connectors on the back (it looks like it did). It boots
just fine and shows 512K of RAM, seeks on the drive for a moment and then
jumps right into MS BASIC.

Opening it up I (which is nice and easy) I find:

Mostly pretty standard equipment: floppy controller, serial card,
 parallel card
Color Graphics Controller
256K RAM card (with some very interesting looking RAM chips...1" x 1"
 squares with what looks like an aluminum cover on top)
LOTS of sheilding (in fact, everything is sheilded, the power supply, the
 display and even the cards are enclosed in a sheilding panel)

IBM didn't really try that hard with this. It's basically a desktop PC
machine with the disk drives squeezed over to make room for the screen.
But it has a handle!

BTW, I paid $10 for it at a thrift store.

Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar_at_siconic.com
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Received on Sat Jan 24 1998 - 23:02:16 GMT

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