Ancient Web: The IBM PC110 Site Preserves a Palmtop That Was Too Weird for Its Own Good

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

The IBM PC110 looks like somebody challenged the 1990s to fit a real PC into a jacket pocket and refused to accept the obvious answer.

Visit Daniel Basterfield's IBM PC110 pages

The machine was sold in Japan in the mid-1990s. It used a 33 MHz 486-class processor, had a tiny color display, built-in modem, PCMCIA expansion, and weighed about 715 grams with a battery and hard disk installed. Daniel Basterfield's site exists because owning one outside Japan meant becoming your own support department.

The page says it plainly: unless you could read Japanese, you were probably going to install another operating system.

A support site for a machine IBM barely supported

The useful part is not nostalgia. It is the accumulated troubleshooting.

Basterfield documented batteries, external power packs, storage, operating-system installation, accessories, mailing lists, English-language documentation, and the strange development history behind the machine. One history page points out that the PC110's board carries the word "MONOLITH" and a design date from 1992, years before the product reached market.

The battery pages are pure old-web utility. They compare expected run time with hard disks versus flash storage and preserve homemade external battery-pack instructions built from Radio Shack parts. The links page points toward old mailing lists, translations of Japanese PersonaWare modules, and user documentation that was difficult to find even when the machine was current.

That is what makes specialist pages like this survive.

A modern product database can tell you the processor speed. It probably will not tell you which power adapter somebody successfully substituted in 1998 or how long a particular PCMCIA hard drive ran on the stock battery.

The PC110 was tiny. The support burden around it was not.

Return to the IBM PC110 archive

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.