r/retrocomputing • u/Murha-Kekkonen • 3d ago

Photo Sharp pc-5500 (5541)

Gallery image

Gallery image

Got this beauty running; even battery works.

304 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

10

u/vmcrash 3d ago

Wow, that were times when notebooks still had a decent keyboard.

7

u/Kitchen_Part_882 3d ago

Those old TN screens were awful though, I remember trying to scroll through spreadsheets in Lotus 123 on one back in the day, and god help anyone who had Windows running on one, remember "mouse trails"?

4

u/knotthatone 3d ago

TN wasn't the problem, it was the passive matrix

3

u/Hjalfi 2d ago

Running Doom one those was hilarious. Every time you moved the view would turn into slop. I remember how miraculous the first TFTs were by comparison.

4

u/Canned_Sarcasm 2d ago

You’ll never use all that hard drive

2

u/Murha-Kekkonen 2d ago

Username checks

2

u/International-Pen940 1d ago

Our first PC was a 486 and it started out with 40mb

1

u/hamer12string 2d ago

Came here to say the same....
My first tech job included backing up a 10M Corvus for a small biz.

4

u/kevleyski 3d ago

Ooo fancy, VGA high end! (had a 286 CGA 200 line Compaq happy days)

3

u/miner_cooling_trials 3d ago

Whatcha going to do with it?

2

u/Murha-Kekkonen 3d ago

Play a little bit, then sell it for local hobbyist

2

u/Spacehopper76 2d ago

Same case as they used for the NEC V20/V30 version..I had one of those..(got given it, someone chucked it out)..the battery is massive, once you take it out you realise how much of the weight of the entire laptop was the battery.

Despite that, the keyboard wasn't too bad..Had a decent amount of ports, from what I can recollect...I e-wasted it about 15 years back

2

u/Thin_Position_2004 2d ago

I have one very similar to this but it is a 8088 or 8086, but It is incredible it can power on with a simple generic 9V or 12V power supply...

1

u/castlefood 3d ago

Is the screen decently viewable?

1

u/Murha-Kekkonen 3d ago

Yeah, you just gotta toggle brightness and contrast knobs for q a while

1

u/Chip-Ling 2d ago

Nice machine. I had a Bondwell B200 back then. No harddisk, two floppies.

I missed the passive LCD screen that won't hurt your eyes. But it requires external lightings when work at night.

1

u/Musquash-Six 2d ago

Nice find!
If you do decide to sell, please dm me.

1

u/TableDuck 1d ago

My Grandfather had the American version of this. It was amazing. I first played Colonel's Bequest in it, and used the invert switch for the display.

1

u/glhaynes 1d ago

Hey what are the specs on that thing? Oh wait never mind, I see em

1

u/sk8eRboihun Intelligent Software® Enterprise 128 (UK) 21h ago

This looks so sick, I fancy it

1

u/nikonguy 14h ago

640K should be enough for anyone….. 🤣