IBM announced its new machine, the 5150, on 12 August 1981. It was no ordinary launch: the 5150 wasn’t the ‘big iron’ typical of Big Blue – it was a personal computer.
IBM’s Personal Computer: the 5150
Source: IBM
IBM came late to the party. Through the 1960s and 1970s, it had focused on corporate computing: expensive mainframe and, later, mini computers. But by the end of the 1970s, it had seen the likes of Tandy’s TRS-80, Commodore’s Pet and Apple‘s Apple II win support from smaller businesses, individuals and even in some of the big companies IBM traditionally targetted. Read the rest of this entry »
Many men are facing a dilemma in the coming days. Thanks to the Royals, a great, great, yawning maw of consecutive weekly Bank Holidays looms large. With enforced downtime, this means a stark choice: either face the family, or retreat to the Garden Shed. To help you make this choice, here are some suggestions.
My desk at Vulture Central is like many an attic – colleagues dubbed it the “vintage computer museum”. I suspect many of you have got stuff that includes gear we’re keen to get rid of, but can’t get round to eBaying or even moving. And it never seems to diminish. Old stuff is replaced by even older stuff.
Here, I’ve tried to set a challenge. What’s the best computing kit you can get for under £100 – preferably with some unique feature that modern computers can’t replicate? In other words, it’s not old for the sake of being old, or nostalgia. It has to have a bit of real utility.
To make it even harder, I’ve excluded hire-purchase deals. You can get a thoroughly modern computer in half an hour, if you pick it up from a mobile network or Carphone Warehouse. But, obviously, that’s cheating.The cost isn’t really £50 or £100, that’s merely the first instalment. And there must be a word for that sinking feeling people have when they look at an Atom netbook purchased on a two-year contract that still has months to go, and is as alluring as a four-day-old kebab.
So here are five suggestions, and then a roundup of what didn’t make the cut – and some of the absences are quite surprising. Read the rest of this entry »
Review About 10 years ago, Psion’s handheld computers were the ones to beat and the Psion Series 5 was at the top of the heap. The keyboard was tiny but so well designed that it was really possible to touchtype on it. Indeed, the Series 5 set the standard for others to emulate, and, quite simply, as far as usability is concerned no other small format device since has come close.
New series? PsiXpda’s Pocket Computer
The PsiXpda doesn’t claim to be a Series 5 for the modern world but – being brought to us by the pairing of an ex-Psion employee and a handheld computing enthusiast – hopes are high that it might recapture some past glory. It falls into the UMPC category, being a fully-fledged Windows XP Professional machine.
Relying on an Intel Atom processor, the PsiXpda has a 5in screen and relatively sizeable keyboard, 16GB of SSD storage and microSD card support. It also features Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and a SIM card slot for mobile data – all quite alluring, really. Read the rest of this entry »
