[michaelsmanley]

When I was a co-op student employee at IBM in the late 80s, I was given a desk in what was otherwise a storage room piled with stuff that had been used and then set aside. One box contained a 5140 convertible laptop with one of each peripheral "slice" -- printer, modem, expansion ports -- and the full set of technical manuals.

I was allowed to take that beast home with me. I learned so much tinkering with that machine. Eventually, I sold the whole set at a ham fest and I have regretted it often.

Nice to see an appreciation of it, though I would never have looked at it as alligator-like.

[lemonlearnings]

Any details to share re. specs, operating system?

[michaelsmanley]

That was almost 40 years ago, so little I recall other than it was an 8088 variant in there, the peripheral bus was unique to that machine and the only documentation was in the tech manuals (as opposed to the hardware reference book I had for everything else), and I got lucky and the lab had requisitioned a Model 2, so the screen was nice and they'd gotten the full 640Kb RAM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_Convertible has all the details on that machine you could want.

[reaperducer]

I had one. Great little system. Built like a tank, and just as heavy.

Incredibly forward-thinking modular architecture. Keyboard, memory, drives, serial port, parallel port, even the screen could be replaced just by the turn of a lever or a push of a button.

Fantastic keyboard, even by today's laptops standards.

Ate batteries like M&Ms. I almost always kept it plugged in.

At the time, running it off the pair of 720k floppies was fine. I believe there was a hard drive option, but I never saw it.

Its biggest weakness was the screen. There were backlit and CRT options, which were better and you could just pop off and in.

The screen was grayscale CGA, but there was a TSR called SimCGA which would translate, so you could run EGA programs.

[michaelsmanley]

Yeah, when I say "nice" about the screen, it is all relative. Mine was nice compared to the original screen on the Model 1.

There are very few pieces of laptop/notebook hardware that I really enjoyed. The 5140 was one of them. I doubt I'd enjoy it now, but 40 years ago I found it just lovely.