Talk:IBM Portable Personal Computer

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Connection to the XT[edit]

The Portable was not a big seller due to the public's confusion over what it really was: It should have been called the Portable XT, which would have been more accurate. "Portable PC" implied the earlier PC technology, which led consumers to believe it was less advanced than it actually was.

Until 1985, All "PC/XT"'s sold had hard drives, it was one of their biggest selling points next to the original PC that they kept on the market for a number of years after introducing the XT.

The portable was never offered with a factory hard disk (you could add one, I had a seagate st225 in mine), only had 5 slots (like the original PC, the 'XT' had 8).

It is true that it used an XT-derived motherboard (with 5 slots instead of 8, an XT ROM, and no casette port), but this was NOT an "XT" in IBM-marketing-speak.

Personally, I think offering it with a hard disk and THEN calling that model "The Portable XT" might have met with more market success than they had, but that is just my speculation. The machine was still quite inferior to Compaq's offerings at the time, a factory HDD might have helped, but....</my2cents>

--Oregonerik (talk) 21:54, 10 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The comment about 5 slots versus 8 isn't correct. The 5155 used the exact same motherboard used in the XT, and had 8 slots. The big limitation was that 5 of these slots were behind the disk drive(s), and therefore users couldn't install full length cards in them. From the factory the floppy disk controller card and the CGA video card used 2 of the 3 full length slots. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 32.213.142.72 (talk) 14:14, 14 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]