Yeah… I have idea why. When I go to the site itself and click, it doesn’t do this… I’ll track it down at some point.

There may be some to this.

But I'm not entirely convinced that IBM just didn't know how to do this. E.g., there's the Aquarius concept (1977), which had progressed to working production prototypes, which would have come attractively packaged and with an app store based on bubble memory cards. (Apparently, this was canceled over concerns regarding the reliability of those bubble memory cards.) As a marketing concept, this would have been about 25–30 years ahead of its time – and it would have separated this neatly from any other IBM business. However, any such elaborate concept would probably have struggled in an organisation like this, where any move may endanger what has already been secured.

Maybe, the remarkable lack of context of the IBM 5150 was its internal selling point?

(Imaginary internal sales pitch: "See, this machine has no specs. We won't even say what it's for. We'll just tell them, the Little Tramp likes it, so you like it, too. No, it won't eat into mainframes.")

*) More about the IBM Aquarius (including photos) can be found in Paul Atkinson's book "Delete. A Design History of Computer Vapourware", Bloomsbury, 2013.

I'm still curious, what this machine was meant to be. One version is that it was about something that would enable small local tasks, like data entry, editing, etc., but would require some kind of IBM mainframe for any serious task, like actually processing or managing this data. Much like the IBM 3270 PC. (So, really a front door to renting out mid-sized machines?) But in this conception, the PC would have soon been superceded by the XT running Lotus 1-2-3 and its storage capabilities, and finally dead by the advent of the 386 machines, which were perfectly able to run all of this locally. Are the latter even PCs, conceptionally, or were they something new, but still something, people could envision in the original PC (and maybe had expected from it, all along)?

PS: One of the things, I kind of don't get, is this entire approach to acquiring an office PC, of going around, like, "no this person doesn't need a floppy drive, this person doesn't need a printer either, no parallel port for them, this person may need 256 KB more, so give them at least 128 KB, well, this one requires at least a screen, etc." I don't think that this was what customers expected deploying PCs to the office would look like, involving an entire requirements committee, fearful of spending either too little or too much. It would have been much easier and probably also cheaper (for all parties involved) and certainly more attractive to come up with just a few standard configurations and load this off onto everybody's desks, like an actual product. (Much like it was with the PS/2. But, then, IBM wasn't really into selling products.) – On the other hand, admittedly, it made the IBM PC specs-wise a moving target, when it came to any competition.