[jazzy piano tune]
Greetings!
And today on LGR we’ve got one of the smallest, most unique,
and most amusingly compromised yet capable PCs of the 1990s.
This is the IBM Palm Top PC110, released in 1995 exclusively in Japan through a cooperation
between International Business Machines and Ricoh Company Limited.
And it was more than just a tiny DOS and Windows PC, it also strove to be a personal organizer,
a digital notepad, a desktop clock, a portable fax machine, a digital camera, and even a
straight-up telephone handset all in one little device.
Seriously.
And it sold for between ¥169,000 and ¥289,000 depending on the memory configuration and
operating system, with PC DOS 7.0, Windows 3.1,
and OS/2 Warp 3 all available from the factory.
And although it’s smaller than a VHS tape, the PC110 runs Doom natively with full-color
VGA graphics and Sound Blaster sound admirably well.
[tiny Doom gameplay commences]
The miniaturized hardware inside meant it was a generation slower than the newest full-sized
laptops back then, but c’mon, just look at it!
Its size made it irresistible to the right customer in the mid-90s, measuring 158x113x33mm
and weighing only 630 grams with the battery installed.
The body is all metal as well, none of that rubber-coated plastic
used on so many ThinkPads of the time.
A material which helps give it a solid “brick of technology” feel in the hands, and a
satisfying “clink” whenever you close the lid.
[clink!]
And no surprise, it’s become highly sought-after by collectors today,
with auction prices soaring for years now.
So a huge thanks to LGR viewer Kevin for loaning me this one for the video, complete in box
with all its lovely packaging, accessories, and Japanese documentation.
This whole bundle is delightful and it’s something I’ve wanted to cover for years
so I’m psyched.
The PC110 is just so miniscule for its time that it’s still kind of unbelievable, truly
putting the “sub” in the term “subnotebook.”
And a subnotebook is really what this is,
despite IBM putting “Palm Top” in the name.
Even though it’s close on form factor, calling the PC110 a palmtop gives the wrong impression.
Most palmtops were underpowered PCs running older versions of DOS with wide monochrome
screens, and had limited graphics and little to no sound.
And those are a lotta fun in their own right, but the PC110 goes a step beyond by including
a 33 megahertz 486, 8 megs of RAM, 8-bit PCM sound, and 256-color VGA graphics paired with
a 4.7-inch backlit LCD.
Again, thoroughly impressive among its subnotebook peers in ‘95.
And subnotebooks were all over the place back then, with machines like the NEC Ultralite,
Compaq Contura Aero, HP OmniBook, Gateway Handbook, and the legendary Toshiba Libretto
all offering something different to the tiny notebook table.
But IBM Japan sliced out a niche all for themselves with the PC110, being half the size of its
competitors, and a quarter of the size of your typical IBM ThinkPad
like the 380XD seen here.
It was also half the size of its indirect predecessor, the IBM ThinkPad 220, another
Japan-exclusive, and one equipped with a 386 and an LCD that was larger but monochrome.
It ended up outperforming IBM’s projected sales numbers, so the idea was to build a
faster follow-up that was even smaller, hence the “110” in the name, being half of 220.
Cute.
Similarly amusing was all the promo material that featured Ultraman as the product’s
CM character/mascot, earning it the nickname of “The Ultraman PC”
among Japanese user groups.
And in order to actually build the machine, IBM made use of their ongoing partnership
with electronics company Ricoh, who you may know for their imaging and camera products.
Back then they were just getting into digital cameras themselves, with the Ricoh RDC-1 launching
earlier in ‘95, an impressive device in its own right being the first digital camera
shooting both pictures and video with sound.
And it’s not hard to imagine that the PC110 shares a bit of that digicam DNA.
Heck, the PC110 even uses a 1200 milliamphour lithium ion battery with a design that wouldn’t
look out of place inside a camera.
And that’s because that’s exactly what it is.
The IBM branding is simply for show, and there’s no issue swapping it out with standard camera
batteries used by Sony, JVC, and Panasonic.
Which means getting a new battery for the 110 is far easier than it is with most old
laptops, with new generic replacements still being made.
There is no camera built into the computer itself though, it was a bit too early for
that, despite the Ricoh imaging collaboration and the use of camera batteries.
Though it didn’t take long for a camera to show up, with Canon releasing the CE300
camera for it that plugged into the PCMCIA slots,
kinda like the Nikon CoolPix 100 but even smaller.
Look at her taking mid-90s laptop selfies, wild stuff!
[advertisement plays in Japanese]
And since we’ve already begun pokin’ around them, let’s peruse the ports, which are
understandably lacking yet also surprisingly generous.
On the left hand side we’ve got the power on and off switch, along with two PCMCIA Type
II expansion slots, which doubles as a single Type III slot.
On the right hand side next to the battery bay is a switch for turning on and off the
telephone ringing sound, more on that in a sec.
And below that is another card interface, sometimes called Smart Pico-Flash.
Turns out this is a CompactFlash slot, continuing the 110's camera-like qualities, and it uses
any compatible CF card as a swappable IDE drive.
Super useful stuff considering how common it is
to install CF to IDE adapters in old laptops anyway.
And around back from right to left we’ve got a wireless infrared port and a jack for
the 13.7 watt AC adapter.
Which is this little thing right here by the way,
no need here for a big ThinkPad power brick.
And to the right of that is a headset connector, combining both microphone in and speaker output
into a 4-pole 2.5mm audio jack.
And the USB-looking port beside that is another combo port meant for a PS/2 keyboard or mouse.
IBM included this dongle with the PC110 to make use of that, which can be paired with
a PS/2 Y-adapter to connect both a keyboard and a mouse simultaneously.
Heh, I love how a normal sized mouse looks downright huge connected to this thing.
Another thing accessed around back is the clock battery, which takes care of maintaining
BIOS settings as well as the other clock around front.
Yep, there’s a slimline liquid crystal display on the front bezel that displays the time,
battery charge status, keyboard options and so on.
There’s also a third battery inside, known as a bridge battery, that keeps the machine
running while you swap the main battery for a fresh one.
A handy feature, but it’s been removed here since it’s one of the nastier Nickel–metal
hydride things that have the potential to leak.
And lastly, there’s the built-in 2400 bps modem, which pops out to accept the standard
RJ-11 phone cable included in the box.
This allowed you to send and receive faxes, hop online, check your email, and use the
PC110 as a telephone handset.
Yeah that’s right, flip it on its side and the whole computer becomes a phone!
N-Gage Taco Phone, eat your heart out, IBM was doing awkward sideways phone calls
all the way back in 1995.
-Really ergonomic.
The way this works is the phone switch on the front corner also functions as the computer’s
speaker, and by extension, a telephone earpiece.
And the microphone to the left of that functions as the phone’s mouthpiece.
Heh, ya gotta wonder how many people actually used it as a phone back then.
I can only assume users were more inclined to use the second headset port on the front
instead, which only works with the phone and doesn’t output the computer’s sound.
I also wonder how many folks actually used its 90-key keyboard for very long before going
external, because man, this is rough.
Unlike IBM’s other innovative mini-laptop in ‘95, the ThinkPad 701C, there’s no
clever Butterfly mechanism that allows the use of full-sized keys.
Instead, like the rest of the machine it’s a compromise designed by the itty bitty PC
committee, with keys measuring only nine millimeters across.
And there’s hardly any vertical travel,
with each keycap squishing down onto rubber domes.
[pressing keys squishily, soft beeping]
Though it admittedly does work better used handheld instead of on a desk or a lap,
like some kind of double-sized Blackberry.
The mouse section is designed to be used handheld as well, with buttons on both the left and
right hand corners above the keyboard.
Blue left clicks, green right clicks, and the red thing over here is the pointing head.
It’s similar to IBM’s Trackpoint nub but a bit larger,
and it works about as well as that does.
Now, you might be wondering about that thing in the middle, and nope, it’s not a trackpad.
This is the Memopad, a pressure-sensitive digitizer that’s largely used for things
like writing signatures and taking short notes.
And even though it looks like one, it is not a mouse.
Well, not without custom drivers at least,
apparently there’s a set of those for Windows 95.
Which it’s fully capable of running by the way!
I haven’t done that here since it’s not my computer and I’m not about to change
any configuration stuff, but yeah.
With a 33 megahertz 486SX processor and eight megs of RAM on board, it’s crankin’ out
just enough speed to run a good chunk of Windows applications.
And it’ll do so at 640x480 at 256 colors all day thanks to the Chips & Technologies
65535 chipset with 512K of video RAM.
The display itself doesn’t do it any favors of course,
being a 4.7-inch passive matrix STN.
So you get plenty of the usual smearing and ghosting for these displays, plus a regrettably
common issue where it’s slowly starting to deteriorate and lose contrast in the middle.
It's a problem with the PC110 that's seemingly inevitable
from what I can tell from photos online.
But considering its age it’s surprisingly vibrant and legible, with sharp crispy text
that’s easy to read and a backlight that makes it usable in dim environments.
One thing you might've noticed by now is that there's no floppy disk drive, which was still
an absolute must-have back then.
In fact there's not even a place to plug one in externally, despite one being included
by IBM in this bundle.
And welp, that's where the docking station port replicator comes in.
Thankfully it's not much bigger than the 110 itself, mostly just making it a little taller.
With that snapped into the expansion interface underneath you’re provided with the much-desired
3.5-inch disk connection, as well as serial and parallel ports, 15-pin VGA out, another
power connection, and dedicated PS/2 ports so you can stop living that dongle life.
It certainly cuts down on the whole handheld design idea, but at least it doesn’t take
up much more space on a desk.
And finally, there's the RAM situation, with 4 megabytes on-board and 8 meg SKUs of the
110 sold by IBM.
And a maximum of 20 megs available by installing 16 megabyte upgrade kits from retailers like
T-Zone, costing roughly $300 US dollars in 1996.
Right!
And with that, let’s power it on and see what the Palm Top PC110 can do.
[computer quietly starts, beeps]
Little surprise this little thing makes little noise,
with no floppy drive or cooling fans inside.
And the hard drive?
Well, there actually is no hard drive!
Yet it’s booted into DOS/V and we’ve got a C:¥> prompt,
so clearly it’s loaded from something, right?
Turns out the PC110 uses internal flash memory as a solid state drive
with a whopping four megabytes of storage.
Barely a few floppy disks worth of space, but still ten times more than it needs to
load a minimal DOS setup with a handful of megs remaining.
And hey, if you opted for the 2431-YDW bundle then a removable hard drive came with it,
packed inside this classy IBM pouch.
This is the Intégral Viper, a 260 megabyte PCMCIA hard disk.
Being a Type III device it fills up both expansion slots, but it was a necessary tradeoff back
then if you planned to run Windows, OS/2, or really much of anything beyond DOS.
There was also the CompactFlash option, but in 1995 that format was still brand new so
the cards were expensive and maxed out at 15 megabytes.
Not an issue today though, so I’ll be using both the Viper drive and a CF card, with the
Viper containing the original Windows 3.1J install
and the card holding all my games and software.
And for the most part, this functions the same as any other mid-90s PC with multiple
hard disks, with the Japanese keyboard and PC DOS/V commands being the main difference
compared to western systems.
Most of the symbol and punctuation keys have moved around and the frequently-used backslash
is now a yen sign in DOS/V, though once you learn where things are
it’s business as usual.
A bigger change is the software that loads on startup: Personaware.
I bet you never saw it coming.
IBM Personaware is a tidy graphical frontend for DOS
that provides a bunch of personal organizer-type applets.
So in addition to the previously-mentioned Notepad used for jotting down notes by hand,
there’s also a scheduling/calendar app, a todo list for organizing daily tasks,
a notebook for typing text instead of writing it by hand, an address book already populated
with IBM stuff, a basic email client, a virtual fax machine program, the telephone app for
taking and receiving phone calls, an infrared connection helper for wireless data transfers,
a world map and clock for referencing different time zones, a feature-rich scientific calculator,
a text editor for manipulating common text file formats, and menus for personalizing
the applications with your information as well as managing BIOS options
and power settings for the PC110 itself.
There’s even a game, titled “Game,”
that lets you play a game in a rather game-like fashion.
It’s one of those tile-matching 'SameGames' where you try to eliminate all the tiles by
clicking two or more matching objects.
All good stuff, and a pretty standard selection of software that you'd find on most palmtops
and personal organizers in ‘95, just with the higher resolution color graphics
of the PC110.
Then there’s Windows 3.1J, an optional option that optionally came with the hard drive option.
[Windows startup chime]
Nothing’s stopping you from installing other operating systems in other languages, but
this is what it came with so that’s what I’m using.
And I can’t say there are many differences here,
other than the text all being in Japanese of course.
With that comes a few visual tweaks to make things more readable, along with some software
for adjusting character settings and shortcuts to the included DOS/V utilities.
Beyond that, it’s simply Windows 3 running on a miniature mid-90s machine.
And that’s awesome enough in my book.
[Chip's Challenge MIDI plays]
By the way, y’know I mentioned this has an 8-bit sound chip?
It uses an ESS AudioDrive 488 for compatibility with the original Sound Blaster in mono,
which is great for the 110 with its single right hand corner speaker.
In addition to that, there’s also a dedicated Yamaha FM synth chip on-board, the YM3812-F.
Yeah, an OPL2, not the OPL3 so often used in 1995 and no emulation either.
Just an AdLib on port 388h.
I don’t have the right audio cable to do a direct recording,
but let’s take a listen anyway.
[music from Tyrian plays]
Ah. Fantastic stuff, especially in such a small laptop.
And that’s really the overall takeaway here.
The IBM PC110 is way better than I thought it would be considering its diminutive form
factor and Palm Top branding, and it’s a shame that it was only sold in Japan for a
little over a year or so and never saw any upgraded follow-ups or anything.
Though that didn’t stop folks from importing them almost immediately, with plenty of PC110
fansites and English user guides popping up before long,
and an enthusiast scene that continues to this day.
And I get it!
The fact that I can play SimCity 2000, Jazz Jackrabbit, and Descent on a device from 1995
that truly fits in the palm of my hand?
That alone is special.
But then it’s also got Sound Blaster sound, color VGA graphics, a CompactFlash slot, and
uses lithium ion camera batteries?
Well that puts in legendary status.
I mean c’mon, the thing is actually smaller
than the mini ThinkPad 701C model I put together a while back.
And it’s a fully-functional PC from 1995 not just a kit, ugh!
I can’t help having my mind blown a little whenever I stop to think about it.
Granted, having a 33MHz 486SX limits what you can do, especially in Windows 95,
and the passive matrix display that slowly goes bad is a real downer.
But I’ve heard rumblings of a TFT replacement being worked on, and 40 megahertz CPU overclocks
are well-documented, so that’s something.
You’re still left with that petite keyboard and no FPU though, so if those are deal breakers
then hey, Toshiba Librettos are a thing and they cost less than a PC110.
They’re just not quite this small or collectible, so if you’re like me and enjoy
tracking down PCs that pushed the boundaries for when it was made,
then the IBM Palm Top PC110 is a good call indeed.
-Hehe, "good call."
[piano-laden outro jazz plays]
And if you liked this video then do check out my other episodes about shrunken old computers,
IBM and otherwise.
Or subscribe for a new LGR episode each week.
And as always, thank you for watching!