I had one of these and have to agree that the screen wasn''t that bad when compared to others of the era. I had used it with an adapter for Shortwave radios that allowed you to decode various types of transmissions. I sold it to a guy at a swap meet who was going to use it for a packet radio terminal. He liked the full keyboard and the "convenient" size. :-)

I had one of these things, and it really was a truly horrible piece of hardware.

The screen was so bad that even with an anglepoise lamp positioned directly over it, you could barely read it. Who came up with the idea of a non-backlit black-on-dark-green LCD?? It''s just nuts.

And yes, it will run on 8 D-cell batteries. Good luck getting an hour''s use out of them! Running on batteries is a hideously expensive proposition.

I ran MS-DOS 3.3 happily on this machine. I bought it second-hand with no software, if I remember correctly.

If you have one of these, just toss it in the bin. It really doesn''t deserve to be remembered.

I remember a 640 coming into our company''s possession in the late 80''s. We ran our business systems on an IBM S/36, and our month end processing took all week-end. I had to drive to the factory 2 or 3 times every month-end weekend to check the processing was OK, and fix any errors if necessary and prod it along again. We had a PC in the systems office with a S/36 terminal emulator in it, and it also had a modem (for sending BACS payments).
So, when we got the PPC640, I was able to transfer the S/36 console to the systems office PC, and take the PPC home, and dial in and use PCAnywhere to run the PC which had the S/36 Console. Absolutely brilliant for its day. What used to take a few hours out of my weekends now took a few minutes. I don''t remember any complaints about the screen.