Columbia University Computing History   
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The IBM 5100 Portable Computer

IBM 5100
Photo: IBM history archive.
Date: 1975. From the IBM History website: "One of the first 'portables' on the market, it can store more information than any other commercial machine (48,000 bits), contains a small display screen, and can be used as a terminal for the System/370. More 'luggable' than portable, it weighs 50 pounds and costs from $9,000 to $20,000."

IBM 5100
Photo: Oldcomputers.net
Other specs: 5-inch 16×64 monochrome monitor, 16K-64K main memory, 204K quarter-inch tape cartridge; available operating systems: APL, BASIC, or both (selectable by toggle switch on front panel). Nicknamed SCAMP (Special Computer, APL Machine Portable). We had several of these in Watson Lab in the mid-1970s — in those days, APL was a prestige language and these were our first desktop computers.

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Lan­guage Link Date Trans­lator Organ­ization
Russian Русский 2023-07-16 Alexey Plastic Recycling Company
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Columbia University Computing History Frank da Cruz / fdc@columbia.edu This page created: January 2001 Last update: 27 March 2021