It has been a long time aborning – going as far back as 1983 and the Portable Personal Computer, which was so carelessly designed that you had to put a phone book under the front in order to see the screen if you wanted to use it on a desk – but IBM may at last have come up with a winner in the por-table computer market if early reports of the company’s forthcoming notebook computer – now expected late next month – are to be believed. According to Microbytes Daily, IBM has already sold hundreds of hundreds of a new notebook system called the L40 SX to graduate students at the Harvard Business School, and users there say that it is very similar to the Compaq Computer Corp LTE 386s/20. It has 20MHz 80386SX processor, 2Mb to 18Mb memory, the 60Mb hard disk that has got people excited, a 3.5 floppy disk, and a VGA LCD screen, and weighs 7 lbs 8 oz. One user described the keyboard as the best feature of the machine – the keys do not travel as far as on a Toshiba Corp notebook, but the key placement is better than on either the Toshiba or Compaq machines, and an external numeric keypad is available for those that want the spread of full keyboard. IBM itself is reportedly very pleased with what it calls a no comp-romises keyboard. The L40 SX has a fuel gauge that indicates the power remaining in the battery and the ones at Harvard also include a 2,400bps data modem and 9,600bps facsimile modem, but it is not clear whether the latter will be standard when the machine comes out. The battery is good for three hours, and that could be increased to four – and it takes 10 hours to recharge. A `rice of $5,000 to $5,500 is expected (CI No 1,581), but mail order prices of 80386SX notebook computers are below $2,500 in US.
