The Convertible was also known as the 5140 and was first sold in April 1986. This was a world in which portable computing was in it's infancy and whilst Data General's /One and GRiD's Compasss had established flat displays, folding clamshell onto a machine which would sit on your lap, IBM was many many years away from this and still struggling to design something portable which would appeal.
It was replaced in 1991 by the PS/2 L40SX and even more so by the often overlooked PS/55 Note in Japan.
Here's a brochure!
The Convertible came in three models, largely spotted by their differing displays. The first one with a bloody awful non-backlit panel you could hardly read. The second one had a supertwist panel you would hardly read. The first was an EL display with backlight you could read. The display is wide and vertically compressed and is CGA compatible. You could also attach a normal monitor.
The most obvious way to tell the 3 screens apart is that the first one only had one slider, the last had 2.
Expansion modules were the name of the game, turning a slightly long machine into something crazy-long. You could bolt onto the back various plastic modules to add modems, printers, video, serial, parallel adaptors, a voice synethesiser (!) and so on. It was a bit of a piss-take to be honest with them making you add these plastic modules on just to then be able to do something most PCs would just do.
The year this machine was released was an utterly mad point in IBM's PC division. Some of the 'upgrades' for this machine are shared with the godawful PCjnr and whoever came up with adding plastic panels on the side of the Jnr applied the same concept to the Convertible.
Pushing under the IBM logo in the centre of the panel releases the screen!
Here is a gallery of a couple of my machines. One has the original god-awful display which can hardly ever be read and is degrading year-by-year from the bottom. The other has the (by comparison) fabulous Electro-Luminescent blue display which works a treat and does not seem to be degrading whatsoever!
I've always fancied adding on the green screen display but they're always far too expensive.
CRD on youtube did an absolutely fantastic video on the convertible here.
