IBM 5110 Emulator in JavaScript

The IBM 5100 and 5110 were IBM's first "portable" computers. They had interpreters of the machine languages of IBM's much bigger machines System/3 and System/360 in their ROMs, and so this small computer could execute (slightly adapted) BASIC and APL language implementations of the large machines. The IBM 5110 was the first "real" computer I worked on. We had one in our school, and many thanks go to my physics and to my chemistry teacher for letting us work on this (for me) mega-expensive machine in school back in the early eighties. There was no dedicated computer science course at our school, but the two teachers showed us how the 5110 can be used to solve physics and chemistry problems and introduced us to the fascinating world of computer programming.

I now wrote a JavaScript emulator of the IBM 5110 to be used directly in the web browser. It is a port of Christian Corti's great emulator, which he wrote for Unix systems. There are probably still some bugs and issues with the keyboard mapping, and disk and tape support are still missing. I am working on it, though, and I am looking for dumps of 5110 disks or tapes to use as test cases. If you happen to have such files, please send me an email.

Now, click here to try some BASIC or APL on the IBM 5110 directly in your browser.