Re: You are kidding? Message #9 Posted by db (martinez, ca.) on 2 May 2010, 1:53 a.m., in response to message #8 by Marcus von Cube, Germany
While the IBM 5100 wasn't used for docking maneuvers on the Apollo-Soyuz mission like the 67's less capable predecessor the hp65, i'm sure it was a fine machine. Those "geeky" space shuttle astronauts just bought 41s with their own money and got hp to teach them how to program so they could play Moon Rocket Lander during their orbital off hours too. The programs for ground antenna acquisition, emergency re-entry, landing calculations and the like were just a cover-up. I'm sure the 5100 series could have done all that anyway. That ad should have mentioned it's more impressive abilities, instead of concentrating on helping a clueless real estate agent decide when to do landscaping and telling a farmer what to feed to cows. Forget about all those "toy"-like uses for the 41 like NATO artillery targeting, nuclear & Cardiac/Pulmonary medicine, Optometry, the Math/Stat pac, the high level math and engineering solutions books, the blue water navigation pac, the USAF rom for loading cargo planes. I mean, really; the IBM 5100 was used by Insurance Companies! Wowie!
I found this on a 5100 site:
Time Travelers Need IBM 5100 Computers!
From 2000-2001, John Titor claimed to be a time traveler sent form 2036 to 1975 to fetch an IBM 5100 in order to solve problems with legacy software in 2036 (before Unix systems fail in 2038). He stopped in 2000 to warn us of a civil war that would start in the US in 2005 and culminate in World War III in 2015. He claimed that there was some special hidden feature in the 5100. No toy here.
While wandering around the upper Amazon in the late '90s with my cx and transit doing boundary surveys, i often wished for the "full size keyboard and a reasonable screen" of a "professional machine" like an IBM 5100 series, a generator to power it, a tent to put them in, along with 6 porters to carry it all.
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