(Excerpts from a message dated 12-05-99, Will Honea to Ian Moote)

Hi Will--

WH>Enhancements include added RAM (that's where your BIOS settings are
  >stored) and some additional alarm functions.  BTW, the alarm
  >functionality is fully available - but I don't know of anyone else
  >who uses it.  I use it for a 'tell em you're alive' event in my
  >instrumentation designs so that the monitor up on the snow shed
  >reports in once every week or so even in the summer.

    The BIOS in the first IBM laptop (the IBM Convertible) enabled the
RTC alarm function.  The "new" BIOS interrupt functions were used for
setting the alarm and putting the machine into "suspend" mode, to be
awakened at the alarm time.  I wrote my first "traveling alarm clock"
program (in C plus some inline assembled calls to the "new" BIOS
interrupts) for the Convertible, in 1988.

    Starting with the IBM L40-SX, a program named PS2.EXE has been
available for all IBM laptops I have owned; the functions in this
program can be called by the "system" command available in most
programming languages, or directly from REXX.  For example, from my
current version of WAKEUP.CMD (for my ThinkPad 365XD, running under Warp
4 FixPak 5):

    "@ps2 on" alarm "> null"    /* Set "wake-up" Time */
    "@PS2 sus > null"           /* Put into "suspend" mode */

    The OS/2 version of PS2.EXE for the ThinkPad 365XD came from the IBM
OS/2 Device Driver Pak.  (A Win95 version for the same machine, along
with that operating system, came preinstalled on the machine's hard
drive; I wiped the drive clean and installed Warp 4.)

    Regards,

        --Murray

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