IBM 5100

Which would appear to be a totally meaningless statement. The HP9830, which pre-dated the IBM5100 by a couple of years, but which had somewaht similar facilities -- all-in-one machine, built-in display, keyboard, tape drive, BASIC in ROM (no APL for the HP machine), etc, had a terminal emulator ROM cartridge which worked with a special bit-banged serial interface (not the serial interface used to, say, link up a serial printer). This not only let you use the 9830 as a terminal, it also let you store the incoming data in memory as if it was a BASIC program (obviously syntax checcking was disabled), and you could then save said 'program' onto tape. And of course you could reverse the process and upload the data back to the host mainframe/mini. The idea was to avoid having to pay the storage charges for your files on a timesharing system. One day I must assemble the terminal emulator ROM code from the patent, do any modifications that are neccessary due to differences between the machine in the patent and the production version (I know there are some hardware differences, but they shouldn't matter), and then buld the bit-banging interface and give the whole system a go. -tony