’m hoping to find one that is physically in good shape (e.g., the keyboard “works”) but I don’t presently have dreams of making the original electronics work again (more later).
But first a little background. I guess I’m vintage as well. I learned about computers from a 1945 book “Giant Brains” that I read in junior-high, and went on to win a Science Fair in 1959 building a two bit working relay “computer.” I first wrote a real program in 1962 at an NSF high-school math program at UCLA (a number theory game). In the fall of 1962 my math buddy and I wrote a FORTRAN program to print card-stunt instructions — I went to a big high school, and through my father had access to an 1BM 7090 computer.
In college I switched from physics to very early computer science, and went to graduate school at Berkeley, following Butler Lampson who I had met as a fellow physics programmer of a PDP-1 at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator. Butler was part of a stellar project — Genie — that developed one of the first commercial time sharing systems on an adapted SDS 930 (Tymshare built their service on this system). Genie included people like L. Peter Deutch (the best programmer I ever met) and Charles Simonyi (later of Word fame) and Chuck Grant (founder of NorthStar Computers). After a couple of years I took at summer job at CSC working on the 1108 operating system that became their CSTS service and stayed there. Then a couple of years at UCSF Office of Medical Information Systems (another remarkable group of colleagues) and then off to DEC for a decade. I started at DEC as technical staff to the VP of software, and then worked in the semiconductor engineering group, and then was part of the project with Gene and Carl Amdahl’s Trilogy IBM/360 clone effort. That’s my “vintage” history (up to 1984) and the genesis of the interest in the IBM 5100.
IBM introduced the 5100 soon after I arrived at DEC and invoked what I was told was an already established reaction: Oh my God! IBM is coming after us! Abandon all hope! Sell the s stock. The 5100 was a luggable desktop computer (looked like a Wang computer) with a keyboard and small CRT display. It ran built in BASIC and APL interpreters. There was a nice cartridge tape drive, and it exuded IBM’s mechanical and design elegance. No wonder it was frightening.
But then Ken Olsen, DEC’s CEO, looked at it and scoffed “the font is too small! You can’t read it!” He was right for the market as a whole. You see Ken was older than the engineering corps and the only one with middle aged vision degradation. In the end DEC survived (although the eventual IBM PC was an amazing business).
In any case, that’s why I’m looking for a 5100. The current idea is to drive it with a PI emulator or at least a Pi BASIC and APL interpreters. I would love to hear feedback on all of this.
Peter.christy@gmail.com
But first a little background. I guess I’m vintage as well. I learned about computers from a 1945 book “Giant Brains” that I read in junior-high, and went on to win a Science Fair in 1959 building a two bit working relay “computer.” I first wrote a real program in 1962 at an NSF high-school math program at UCLA (a number theory game). In the fall of 1962 my math buddy and I wrote a FORTRAN program to print card-stunt instructions — I went to a big high school, and through my father had access to an 1BM 7090 computer.
In college I switched from physics to very early computer science, and went to graduate school at Berkeley, following Butler Lampson who I had met as a fellow physics programmer of a PDP-1 at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator. Butler was part of a stellar project — Genie — that developed one of the first commercial time sharing systems on an adapted SDS 930 (Tymshare built their service on this system). Genie included people like L. Peter Deutch (the best programmer I ever met) and Charles Simonyi (later of Word fame) and Chuck Grant (founder of NorthStar Computers). After a couple of years I took at summer job at CSC working on the 1108 operating system that became their CSTS service and stayed there. Then a couple of years at UCSF Office of Medical Information Systems (another remarkable group of colleagues) and then off to DEC for a decade. I started at DEC as technical staff to the VP of software, and then worked in the semiconductor engineering group, and then was part of the project with Gene and Carl Amdahl’s Trilogy IBM/360 clone effort. That’s my “vintage” history (up to 1984) and the genesis of the interest in the IBM 5100.
IBM introduced the 5100 soon after I arrived at DEC and invoked what I was told was an already established reaction: Oh my God! IBM is coming after us! Abandon all hope! Sell the s stock. The 5100 was a luggable desktop computer (looked like a Wang computer) with a keyboard and small CRT display. It ran built in BASIC and APL interpreters. There was a nice cartridge tape drive, and it exuded IBM’s mechanical and design elegance. No wonder it was frightening.
But then Ken Olsen, DEC’s CEO, looked at it and scoffed “the font is too small! You can’t read it!” He was right for the market as a whole. You see Ken was older than the engineering corps and the only one with middle aged vision degradation. In the end DEC survived (although the eventual IBM PC was an amazing business).
In any case, that’s why I’m looking for a 5100. The current idea is to drive it with a PI emulator or at least a Pi BASIC and APL interpreters. I would love to hear feedback on all of this.
Peter.christy@gmail.com