This video really brings back memories. I used to work the tech support hotline for these machines (along with the Geobooks) around the turn of the Millennium. In the downtime between calls, we would sometimes experiment with the sample machines that we had on hand. Trying to get games to run was an interesting challenge. It is actually possible to boot the Geobooks directly to DOS and bypass GEOS, although I don't recall the hot keys to do so off the top of my head (That was over 20 years ago now.) The trouble with Dos games on the PN-9000/Geobook was that keyboard controller didn't appear to return the standard scan codes. Talking to the keyboard through the BIOS commands worked the same as any normal PC, but any software that tried to bypass the BIOS (most action games) would fail. I did manage to get Wolfenstein 3D to work by modifying the source code (which had been open-sourced by that time) to read keystrokes through the BIOS. That worked well enough for navigating the menus, switching weapons, and opening doors, but not so well for movement. However, you could use a serial mouse to handle running and gunning, so the game was perfectly playable, albeit with only PC speaker sound effects. As for who actually bought these "laptops," all I can say for sure is that the folks calling the tech support hotline skewed toward being elderly, and many of them did mistake these machines for regular Windows PCs. That said, the callers might not necessarily be a representative sample of the average PN-9000GR/Geobook owner, as those that knew what the machines were and what they could (or couldn't) do would probably not be making calls to the tech support line as frequently.
@@ActionRetro Oh, and a point of clarification since the way I worded that might be ambiguous. There were three GeoBook models that we supported: PN-9000GR, NB60 and NB80C, of which the PN-9000GR was the lowest-end. The model that I got Wolfenstein to run on was the NB-80C. The NB-80C was broadly the same machine as the PN-9000, but it had a larger color display, VGA port, built-in modem and (if I remember correctly) a marginally more capable web browser. I never tested the hacked Wolfenstein on the PN-9000GR specifically, so I can't say with 100% certainty that it would have run on that one.
@@evilthatiswes Ah cool! Do you remember anything about the key combos to start the machine in stock GEOS, bypass startup scripts, etc? Two buttons, three buttons, F keys? Thank you again for sharing!!
@@ActionRetro I'm an old-schooler '89'er, still many questins about how x86 machines ran code so efficiently. How did dailt life go on one of these machines?
@@ActionRetro I've been racking my brain, trying to remember, but it's been over two decades now since I last saw one of these machines. Seems like booting to DOS might have involved hitting F2 or F3 at the right moment on boot, but I'm not sure.
I had a workmate who's daughter told him she was doing bad in school because she did not have a computer. He was our Aston Tate database guy and said she would not have anything to do with that old blue screen junk. He did not want his girl to have access to the internet but wanted her to see him trying to help her with school. He did not have any lose cash as he had been marred 3 times. He ask me if I had any suggestions as what he could do. I sold him an 8086 with PC-Dos and GeOS. She was so happy with the interface and the print output that with her first English paper she got her first A. She got so much feed back from classmates about how her papers looked she started making money selling presentations even for her teachers. She went to go on to collage with her entrance request letters done on that machine. This was in the late "90s.
It appears from the video, that the GeoWorks office suite and the GeoWrite word processor were in functionality equivalent to something like Microsoft Works. Looks much better and more intuitive than Word for DOS. Apparently, your workmate's daughter mastered the functions of the word processor and became successful with it.
It looks like it uses the same motherboard as the GeoBook. That's why it has unused pinouts for features that aren't on this model but are on the GeoBook, such as the VGA monitor output and PCMCIA slot.
Shame you can't just add the features, but you'd need to locate and solder in all sorts of chips you probably can't buy retail. Still, might be it uses the old Cirrus Logic chip that was in millions of video cards back then, you maybe lift it out and solder it into the Geobook. Well I couldn't, and it's beyond Ben Heck's usual standard. But there are people out there who hand-solder enormous PLCCs over a blacksmith's forge, laughing in a manly way for the duration. Would be pretty nifty to scrap some old 386 stuff and install it there. Not like they were going to pay for a lot of custom chips. The glue's mostly gonna be in the SOC. Well, it's a pipe dream, anyway... Still CGA has it's own charm. For what it is, that might be best to stick with. I doubt if you installed a VGA chip that it'd work with the existing LCD so what's the point? If you want an external monitor just buy a better computer. Similarly what value would a PCMCIA card be with GEOS that won't have any of the drivers? Did the higher-end machines run DOS or Windows 3.1 or something? Even the keyboard not working, it's expressing the charm of "PC Comparables" from back in the day. Not-quite PCs, that went tits-up if you tried to bypass the BIOS calls. The famously slow, useless, BIOS calls. Still I'm impressed they included DOS at all, particularly in ROM. Maybe a future range of disk software was an option they kept in mind? In between designing another 30 completely unique and incompatible kinds of jumped-up typewriter. If IBM had written a decent BIOS to start with, the PC world might look very different now. All sorts of machines, rather than strict clones down to the last transistor. It'd be versatile, you'd be able to divert all sorts of things. Still, Windows does that now, as long as there's a driver...
@@greenaum Rumor has it IBM was in talks with Atari before they went with Microsoft. Judging by the Atari 800, that would definitely have resulted in a decent BIOS! However, most programmers back then hacked the hardware any way they could, partly for performance but partly just because they could. Clones would still have had to have been the same down to the last transistor.
Wouldn't this just be like a "word processor" rather than a "laptop?" When I look at that I just see a modern version of the typewriter sans printer. Wouldn't a "laptop" need a modem?
I remember seeing this being sold at Kmart back in the day, and laughing at them for what they cost at $300, but as a former GEOS user, it is really cool that it does run GEOS Works. I would clean this one up, and keep it original, but if you find another one of these in a bit worse shape, then it might be a cool project to shove a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB with some cooling added on, and a more modern screen in it, and make a retro looking franken laptop.
it does have some qualities going for it. such as that you can't play leisure suit larry on it. which would be a feature if you were buying it for a slacker. edit: maybe it can run who knows
bought a Tandy Model 200 with exactly that in mind, but the darn thing is still working just fine and I just don't have sufficient resolve to gut a working computer from 1984
Geoworks OS on Pc, little graphical predecessor of windows 3.1 - 95 onwards. Eventually it wasn´t ready for the future as GEOS 2.0 only worked on 386/486 machines, pentium onward installation was imposible unlesss. Breadbox Ensemble ddn´t made it anything better !
@@johntrevy1 There's new FastDoom port for old PCs and runs faster than original release, while having additional features, like supporting text mode, CGA, EGA, etc. and it will run on less than 4 MB of RAM. Although it might crash in-game when using original WAD file on less than 4 MB of RAM. However it's possible to run custom maps that use fewer textures.
Not really though, this is significantly more capable than any of the Vtech machines. Grammatically speaking, it would be the Vtech kids laptops giving the Brother "laptops" a run for their money.
@@awesomeferret I'd say it could be on par with something like the VTECH Equalizer (I recommend looking it up if you don't know what it is), but that one only.
In many ways this was actually way ahead of its time, with the cost reduced and relatively small motherboard with the SoC. This is basically akin to a Surface RT; not horrible or unusable by any means, but not something that you'd want to use unless you had to.
Nah, the Dauphin DTR-1 came out in 1993 and was basically a prototype low power tablet, it even had a touchscreen! ua-cam.com/video/DaQR4jk1voQ/v-deo.html That's your surface RT, as long as it doesn't burn you in the 5 minutes it works
Fun fact: the PC/GEOS operating environment is multitasking, multi-threaded, object oriented, is built upon a foundation of x86 interrupt codes, and can run pretty well even on an 8086 with 640k of RAM. It was a masterful piece of engineering!
In the mid 1980's I worked for a portrait/photo studio. The resident techie left for a communications company and I was officially a computer operator. I had been a "why do I need a computer?" film photographer, so an evening college course, "Introduction to IBM compatible computers" was next. The studio's computer was an 4.77Mhz 8088 IBM XT running MS-DOS 3, had a 20MB HDD and a 512K full length monochrome display card, with the usual IBM monochrome monitor, The printers were wide carriage dot matrix printers that shook the flimsy table as they nosily consumed fanfold paper by the yard. PFS: Pro Write and File programs, which managed client lists and order forms rounded out my command line world. All was well until two things happened: A freelance programmer brought pirated versions of XTree and the dBase database programs, which needed color to properly display results. By this time, Computer stores were "everywhere," so I went looking for hardware and software updates. A half length 640K color display card and larger 14 inch color monitor solved one problem, and I bought XTree 4 and dBase to "keep things semi-legal." Since I was using a clone 80386SX computer running Windows 3.1, I looked for such a program that would take me beyond the command prompt. PC GeoWorks Ensemble 1.0, then 1.2 turned this "dawn computer" into something anyone could use. I even envied the limited set of scalable fonts while Windows 3.x only had pedestrian system fonts. The arrival of Truetype fonts changed my computer world, and, I eventually set the IBM XT aside and used the 80386SX desktop clone to "do Windows." GeoWorks Ensemble was swept aside, but I fondly remember those days when a GUI came to an IBM XT.;)
Only thing I could guess this was for was like a 90s equivalent to a Chromebook, a crappy cheap laptop that can be bought in bulk for businesses and schools on a budget.
You'd be shocked what I get up to on my jailbroke Acer 15" Chromebook. ChromeOS removed and replaced with first Elementary OS, but is now running MX Linux. It's been surprisingly durable, reliable, with good battery life and acceptable performance for everyday use. I wouldn't try to edit video with it (Possible, but painful) and photo-editing isn't its strong suit, but for basic internet, word processing, and media consumption it's absolutely fine. It's got a nice screen, decent internal speakers, and HDMI out. The only physical mod I did was to upgrade the 32Gb internal drive to 250Gb.
If you count the number of pins on the video-out connector, you can tell if it was intended to run on CGA or VGA. From looking at the board, I think it was a VGA machine. Personally, I'd try and soup-up this thing just to see if it could ever have reached it's full potential.
The memory would be a cheap and easy place to start, just double the density of those DRAM chips and it'll probably work. Hard to believe that a 386 couldn't address that much.
@@MistahMatzah It depends mostly on the board design. My 386 had 8mb or ram at the time, so yes, the chip can handle it. If there is space in the case, I would install sockets and try out stuff.
@@fixyourautomobile Color isn’t necessary, but a better quality monochrome or grayscale panel in a more standard resolution /with a backlight/ would be a serious improvement.
Action Retro is the real-life, technology equivalent of Rick Sanchez's Curse Purge Plus - Sean takes cursed machines and makes them actually do something.
There is one often overlooked value with a machine like this, it gives no, or at least very limited, possibilities for distractions since gaming on it seems near impossible. Also, no risk of crashing hard-drive.
Those machines weren’t meant as kid’s laptops or anything, they were the beginning of the extinction of typewriters. Some companies, including Brother, started making electronic typewriters in the 1980s. By the 1990s they included simple LCD screens and floppy drives for limited compatibility with DOS/Wintel text files, and the machines were re-classified as “electronic word processors”. Eventually their specs and software started beefing up to the point where they could be used as a (very) low-end PC and still had printers built into the machines. This type of laptop was being sold in places like Walmart in the second half of the 90s, usually for around $125-$200… far less than even the cheapest laptops. By then the built-in printers disappeared in favor of portability and connectivity to standard PC printers. So what started off as an electronic typewriter basically evolved into a low-end laptop by the end of the Millenium. For some people who were super broke and in desperate need of a laptop with barebones functionality, these machines were the only solution. Not good per se but better than nothing.
I think this thing is pretty cool. It's about 2 generations old for 1997, so my guess is that it was cheap. Laptops in 1997 were ridiculously expensive, and this would have been a good value for the time, depending on the price. I mean, those built-in apps would have been comparable to what most people were used to at the time, assuming they didn't have the latest and greatest system and apps, and putting everything on ROM like that would have made it pretty snappy and cheap. Honestly, for what this is, I think it's far better than it needed to be. The word processing machines from this era were often not great, and not really intended to be full laptops, so the fact that it lets you run DOS from ROM and load program from floppy is pretty sweet. The display also looks alright for that era... at that time most laptop screen looked really truly terrible, and this is very readable even via a UA-cam video. I like it! If I see one locally I'll grab it!
These Brother "notebooks" (and I use this term loosely) were priced around $300 (or less) at a time when an actual notebook / laptop would cost you probably $2k or more. Brother was attempting to capitalize on the low price of this device for households that didn't have that kind of money to spend, but still wanted to have an on-the-go computer. It's not a great deal considering what you got, but I guess some people could have been lured in by its portability and price tag.
I think a version of this (or maybe this version itself) was sold in Wal-Mart, and for a long time they prided themselves on selling items, "Made in the USA," and would only deal with companies who, well...you know...until it was found out that most of the stuff they dubbed that was actually, "final assembly in the USA," and sometimes was as simple as it got put into a new package after it hit our shores.
I remember seeing these things marketed and even though I knew they were relatively feature locked they were still kinda interesting. There are a few markets I think they might have been going for. One could be an 'evolution' of their word processor lines for people who might have been adverse to buying a fully fledged computer (at the time I knew many adults that refused to use computers), or maybe towards older kids or teens where a parent would want them to only have a computer for schoolwork. This very much looks like something you'd see as the more fully functional version of those kids laptops that had very limited functionality and even smaller LCD displays.
It does look like a nice machine to write text on and probably has more battery life than the average Win 95 laptop from the day. Would be very interesting to see if the included Geos applications can be extracted and will work on another machine
Back when I sold computers at Incredible Universe in the 90s, we had similar Geoworks-based "word processors" (really a typewriter with a similar embedded PC and an amber-on-black mono VGA CRT). I managed to get Commander Keen running on one using a similar method.
All laptops were sort of ass for a long time. Very expensive, heavy and poor performance compared to the desktops of the day. Even more so than now. There was definitely a market for sub-laptop devices for the word processing crowd, which was the "killer" productivity app for those folks. This thing is late to the market, but not by much. Maybe 2 to 3 years? See devices like the Tandy WP2, Amstrad NC200. This device is special in not being 8 bit though! And double points for GEOS. I am always interested in anything that helps hardware to have a longer life than it 'should'. Great vid 👍
@@hengineer indeed! My amstrad "notebook" got me through 5 years of secondary school. I think it was WordStar compatible. My family couldn't have afforded a "real" laptop and the weight and battery life wouldn't have been viable back then anyway ☺️
I can just see the executive with his bright idea now… “If that thing [GEOS] could run on a C64, think what it could do on today’s cheap hardware! We’ll make so much money licensing it out!”
I remember these they were for word processing in 90's and were meant to be basic and very cheap alternative to full PC. In 90's not every one could afford £1500 PC.
Great video, though something people forget about Windows 9x PCs in the late 90s was that unless you had a fresh install, Windows itself would "decay", slowing down and crashing more often over the course of a few months. Forgetting to save often enough and losing your document was a common frustration and might explain why niche alternatives popped up from time to time.
@@ActionRetro a lot of older dos systems and embedded ones like this one don’t have a bios, (or the bios is so underpowered it’s not configurable except for hardware switches or data written by the primary OS) the dos system runs bare metal on the device and performs the functions of the bios, which is probably why it’s not running true MS-DOS but instead is running a custom version specifically designed for embedded systems. “GEOS” is just a shell sitting on top of this embedded DOS, giving it a GUI. some Linux distros for older machines though can be launched from dos, which kickstarts it into its own environment. I’ll do more digging in daylight and see if I can recall the distro I had because it could do that.
@@ActionRetro tbh MS-DOS is essentially Windows' bootloader, and it can most certainly boot other OSes. Linux distros like Caldera OpenLinux used to give you a program that booted up straight into Linux with no reboot, so I'm confident it can be done even if there's no BIOS menu.
When i saw this video, i was like "oh this has got to be a 1 mil subscribers at LEAST yt channel" but no, only 60k! You have the best content keep on doing your thing!
The GeoWorks applications (file manager, word processor, etc.) running on top of DOS were great, and GeoWorks helped keep a motley collection of rather old 286's useful at my high school on into the mid 90s. (If you didn't want to just use WordPerfect on DOS).
Legit, ty for the pcbway ad. I need some specialty boards for a project and this will save me a lot of time and frustration. I am also glad to see a company other than the usuals advertising with a channel that doesn't have a million subscribers. More reason for me to support them.
When watching this, I couldn't help but remember my grandpa. He was always fond of technology, having spent much od his life in army (radiocommunication, radars and stuff) but in his later days he simply couldn't grasp the idea of computers, especially Windows-based ones. This one would have been a perfect solution for him - he wanted to write his diary, some appointments, and the like. It's however interesting that Brother dug the GEOS out from its grave, 10 years after. I was using it in the Commodore environment and it could do much more than that.The productivity apps are actually quite decent. Even more surprising is the coexistence of GEOS with DOS 6.22. Either of these seems like a reduced/custom version that doesn't do any good to the overall compatibility (like custom keymapping that is held nobody knows where, maybe hardcoded in the ROM?) . And yes, with the crappy refresh rate of LCD screens like this one, don't expect it to be any good in any games :)
Interesting device. I remember using GeOS a lot on the Nokia 9000 and 9110 "smartphones" in about the same time period - 1997 or so. They actually had a rather similar hardware spec (386 processor, monochrome screen) but they were pocket-sized and were definitely connected devices, with full internet access, web browsing, email, and integration with the phone.
It doesn't surprise me at all Catacomb fired right up... there is an amazing two-part video series by Dave's Garage where he breaks down the Fast Inverse Square Root algorithm they used in quake3. The engineers at iD software were literal mad scientist masterminds.
That Top Gear reference, talking about old episodes where they drive crap cars in terrible conditions and getting attached, made me think about the emotional journey that was Oliver.
Nice review, thanks for sharing. You can run PPP and a Hayes modem emulator on the Raspberry Pi, this way I connected a Compaq LTE laptop with Windows 95 to the Internet, you only need a Raspberry Pi and a USB-COM for that. I can send a link to the tutorial I did, but links are probably not allowed here. Is there any HDD on this laptop, or only ROM? RAM disk? Investigating such rare systems is actually much more interesting than making 100 times the same retrobright or running Petskii Robots 1001st time, which some popular reviewers do. And this laptop is not the worst, I have a Bondwell laptop with CP/M OS to repair ;)
There's also some dedicated serial-to-wifi adapters built around the ESP8266 (or the ESP32). Of course, all of these are more powerful than this 'laptop' and at that point you could just gut this thing and drive it all off the Pi.
I worked at Sears and we sold these. They were NOT sold as computers (though they were sold in the computer department) they were sold exclusively as “Word Processors”. College students (on a budget) would buy these instead of laptops because of the price. As I recall, the modems allowed you to connect to the school’s network to submit work, etc. remotely. We didn’t sell many at our store, but they were not intended as computers. Like I said, not everyone could afford a laptop - especially a student. I had a friend who wrote a doctoral thesis on one and the ability to save to a floppy that could be read on a regular PC was great. Your mocking the product comes from you thinking of it like a computer, which it was not sold as nor intended to replace.
These games are probably calling either BIOS or DOS interrupts for keyboard input, but the code is not according to spec or the key codes are different from what the game is expecting, with maybe locale also being a factor.
A preliminary look-around suggests that MX J9734 chip may be some sort of reflashable ROM chip. The only information I could find was on an old NES dev forum, but it didn't have the same follow up digits so it may be a different chip altogether.
If you searched for 9734 then you just found some other random chip that was manufactured in 34th week of 1997. That's the manufacturing datecode, not the chip type ID. (You can see several other chips on the board with similar 97XX datecodes like 9731 on the CPU, 9721 on the keyboard controller and it matches with the vintage of the BIOS date. Different manufacturers put the codes in different places, so it's not always easy to figure out what number is what on unknown chips, so this is good cross verification.)
I remember sitting down and working out how these things work email wise, and writing the support documentation for it, I was working at an BBS turned ISP and we could offer connectivity and email via the BBS. Internet was not really true internet, Pop/SMTP and other mail functions were not an option with these. It was all BBS based where the server end did the hard work. It's a text terminal that could access Pine and Lynx!
it looks very similar to my Tandy Model 200, which came out in like 1984 or 85, has an Intel 8085, and a suit of applications in ROM which includes Microsoft's Muliplan spread sheet. Comparable functionality at about 11 to 12 years prior to this Brother
Can I say... I like (nay, love) how you use your hands... there's something about it. When you point at things, or make hand gestures... it's just... SUBLIME. Just wanted to express that.
Great video! I don't think there's another here about this device. You almost make me want to keep mine. Maybe... My experience is mainly with its succsessor, the NB60 with VGA grayscale and PCMCIA port but I think it's mostly the same. They're great for the intended purpose of a distraction free work environment, and with a pretty good keyboard (I like how all the navigation keys are together and separate from Ins and Del-- fewer mistakes). But if you discover it has DOS you are doomed. Doomed to finding out about upper memory and increasing the files= the in read-only config.sys with device loaders like Devload. Doomed to running GEM and hacking together a keyboard driver to make the keyboard mouse work because the shift keys on these things give the same signal. Doomed to write a batch file that uses text substitution programs to convert GEM's Wordplus files into RTF. Doomed to run GEOS itself from Breadbox, making the thing look and work like Windows 95 by finding the native keyboard driver. Condemned to try Windows 3.x and BasicLinux only to bash your head against that same keyboard. Consigned to finding out all manner of antiquarian nonsense and idly toying with the idea of using FreeDOS as your daily driver, or at least buying a USB-floppy to make the 9000 GR compatible. Most of this won't work on the device featured here due to the lack of storage beyond the 3 1/2" floppy, but you have been warned!
Side note about those screens, I was frustrated for years that my palm pilots were getting harder to look at. Finally figured it out: CFL and LED bulbs. Try it in front of a nice yellow incandescent sometime, you’ll be surprised.
Yeah, wide-spectrum light makes quite a difference. The warm colour temp can help too since they usually have a green-ish or blue-ish silver backing. Which means cool lights reduce the apparent contrast. Some LEDs are good enough but most are a long way off!
I wonder if the integrated serial port in the chip was really meant for some POS terminal connections or something like that. If you got the internal modem it probably was faster. But it is really strange that this one shipped with the PPP software but nothing that could use it.
The thing it's running isn't really GE/OS, and this is borne out by the fact that it's got DOS underpinning it. The PC version of this is just called "Geoworks," and it's more of an operating *environment* than an operating *system*, much like Windows up through 3.11- it just runs on top of DOS. I used this on a couple of my old PC's back in the early 90's.
What a cool old machine! the display and the computer itself really remind me of an Apple IIc using it's (horrible) LCD display, seems like very much the same experience 😀 And I guess if this to be compared to Top Gear, this is your Oliver!
In middle school in the mid 2000s I used an older version of that to program Python at school. When I got home I'd save the text to a floppy, load it into a desktop and try running the code. Before that I'd print off notes at the library and write programs on note-cards, so it was a definite step up.
Oh wow... a 386SX at 33Mhz! This was literally the specs of my first ever laptop in either 1997 or 1997 and was painfully slow. I want to say I got it at a local used computer store called Grolen here in town for around $100, but it was super painful to use even after installing Linux. Almost still wish I had it because the display on this Brother device reminds me of how bad the display on my laptop was and it makes me wonder if what I actually had was more similar to this device because it definitely wasn't a typical "name brand" piece of hardware.
As soon as you showed the serial port my interest was piqued... terminal. Actually looking at its built in functions it doesn't seem that bad, I guess it would have suited some 90s users. At least it could still have some occasional use these days if you can get a decent terminal emulator on there though!
I love this video. I owned a copy of GeoWorks Pro in the late 80's. I also had Windows 3.11 and I am sorry to say windows at the time lost out in most ways. The GeoWorks GUI looked great, ran comfortably on a low power 286 with limited RAM had a good suite of apps (Word Processor, Spread sheet "Quattro Pro" a few simple games, a drawing app I loved etc.) The spreadsheed was an addon they shipped with the GUI but it was able to be run in a mode that looked a lot like Geos. Also a little known these days is that Geos GUI was licensed out as the First GUI for AOHell, and AOL shipped with Geoworks Pro. I did not like AOL at first because it was a pain to get local connections with a modem that was faster than 2400 BPS. But the Geoworks Pro was great. Had they been a little more open with the ability for software developers, I feel it would have been a great contender for MS Windows. The drawing app had the ability to rotate text in any direction, very well defined print output even to a nine pin dot matrix printer. Anyway thanx for the video it was a great look back in time.
It was 1/3 ro 1/5th the price of a standard laptop back in the day. Not to mention it had the office apps built in, for no extra cost. Not a total ripoff, but still rather skimpy on the specs.
Pretty sure this was aimed at schools and students and is based on PC/GEOS. Was for lower end of the market aiming for people not available to afford the newer computers of the time. Like the Pentium 133 and 166 which were the standard machine types then. Edit: I had a 386 laptop with a similar LCD screen. 1. It works best under old school yellow incandescent bulbs. 2. I needed mouse trails turned on , as it got blurry with fast screen draws. I had same issue as you with it
They made a killing on any of those they sold. That's 1992 technology mated to one of their word-processing device screens and sold for almost the price of a real 1997 laptop. Surface-mounted 386 motherboards were available dirt cheap in the 1993-95 time period and would have been available in bulk for very little in 1997, especially with a 386SX-33 in place of the usual DX-40. At the very least, they could have made sure the keyboard mappings worked in DOS, so you could use it as a DOS PC.
This laptop is like if a word processor woke up one day and said "I have had all I can stand, and I can't stands no more!" ate some spinach, and then got as beefy as a word processor could ever get. This is peak word processor performance. You might not like it, etc. etc.
My guess for the weird aspect ratio is that it displays CGA's 640x200 resolution using square pixels. Most CGA-compatible LCD displays doubled the horizontal lines and displayed 640x400 with square pixels instead, so they'll end up with an aspect ratio closer to normal. But that requires a 640x400 display which I guess was expensive.
It would be interesting to pull that version of DOS and GEOS off of thte ROMs and get it running on a standard 386 PC with a slightly better graphics system.
Cidco Mailstation is another oddity from 1999, pitched at elders and others who were non tech, the documentation bundle that comes with it is an inch thick and wou.d have been intimidating. The hardware is a very cool CMOS Z80 system (HD64180 or Z180 !), battery operable and modifisble. well worth acquiring for pennies. Holidiing Shift Function F5 during startup brings up the QA test menus which includes a modem AT terminal acreen :) Also a hex memory editor which allows hand insertion of a 97 byte loader program which allows a Laplink cable to be attached to the printer port and apps loaded from PC :)
Oh god, we had this when I was a child. Not sure where we got it. But I remember it very clearly now that I see it on screen. Didn't remember anything about it other than how it looked and the screen on it being... the way it is. Still, pretty weird given how young I am compared to when this released. I wasn't even born yet.
Word processing, spreadsheets, e-mail. What more did you need back then anyway? At least with these things, you had a stable machine you could work done on. Unlike the Win 95 shit at the time.
The intent of this device was to compete with dedicated word processor machines. Hence the unusual aspect ratio of the screen. So it wasn’t even designed to compete with the far more expensive Win9x laptops of its day. Do I don’t think it was scummy, just a different target audience.
I used to run GeoWorks Ensemble on my PC back in the early '90s. It worked like a charm. I had a full desktop suite that would work on way lower specs than for instance Windows 3.11 or Windows 95.
It isn't really a bad laptop, just misunderstood. Brother was making word processors and the laptop above on a budget. Remember back in the 90s, PCs and laptops were ridiculously expensive. A typical Windows or Mac laptop would run you THOUSANDS of dollars, while Brother's word processors and again, said laptop, would run you hundreds. Even trading off features would still make them worthwhile, even if you couldn't run solitaire and minefield.
Oh man, that knockoff Chicago font inside the main OS! It’s actually quite appealing. I mean, it’s still not as good as real low-res Chicago. But it’s still pretty nice.
That brings back memories. I had one on loan in junior high school for taking notes. My first ever laptop. My uncle once told me it was a regular DOS system. Keeping in mind I was in middle school at the time, I thought I could run an old DOS game, right? I bricked the system and obviously my teacher wasn’t happy. Lol
Looking at the internal construction you can see a spot for a hard drive, math co-pro, more RAM and ROM and probably a VGA controller. I bet this exact machine and board have seen use as a full-fat DOS laptop as well as this cut-down version.
To be fair, it would've been considered mobile at the time, and for somebody like my mother, she probably would've preferred the simplicity coming from typewriters. Realistically, this would've provided for her computer demands just fine at the time. In 94, Radio Shack was selling a 386SX PC full-system for $1399, or an 1110 HD "Notebook PC" for $699 with an 8088 CPU with an ever worse LCD than that Brother thing. I think they were aiming to make an easy-to-use PDA that could double as a typewriter. Then when you get to the office, you could plug it in to your printer and spit out the paper, which made it real (at the time). Also if the scan codes were fixed and they didn't slap that lame geos on it, I could see it being a fun little toy for little me on a road trip, especially if GW BASIC runs on it.
I remember Geos made the Commodore64 quite tolerable. I'm also pretty sure, it took three full minutes to boot off the 5.25 disk. What I do miss about those days is the NLQ printers. A good one was less than $200, and an ink ribbon was less than $6, and lasted a long time.
Going back a bit: "Worst laptop [computer] ever made"? Nahh! One that didn't typically run any kind of GUI would be in that category (a DOS-like-only one, but then you'd have to dial in from there).
Can it even run Zork? I mean that thing is pretty, like, word processor from 1989... The smudges, amusingly, did make me try to clean my monitor to remove them. I like vintage tech garbage, but there is some stuff that even those of us who defy planned obsolescence can't fight for. If you can populate those empty slots, and find the firmware/software/Oscar The Grouch-ware to power them, I'd be interested... Otherwise. Ick.
This video really brings back memories. I used to work the tech support hotline for these machines (along with the Geobooks) around the turn of the Millennium. In the downtime between calls, we would sometimes experiment with the sample machines that we had on hand. Trying to get games to run was an interesting challenge. It is actually possible to boot the Geobooks directly to DOS and bypass GEOS, although I don't recall the hot keys to do so off the top of my head (That was over 20 years ago now.)
The trouble with Dos games on the PN-9000/Geobook was that keyboard controller didn't appear to return the standard scan codes. Talking to the keyboard through the BIOS commands worked the same as any normal PC, but any software that tried to bypass the BIOS (most action games) would fail. I did manage to get Wolfenstein 3D to work by modifying the source code (which had been open-sourced by that time) to read keystrokes through the BIOS. That worked well enough for navigating the menus, switching weapons, and opening doors, but not so well for movement. However, you could use a serial mouse to handle running and gunning, so the game was perfectly playable, albeit with only PC speaker sound effects.
As for who actually bought these "laptops," all I can say for sure is that the folks calling the tech support hotline skewed toward being elderly, and many of them did mistake these machines for regular Windows PCs. That said, the callers might not necessarily be a representative sample of the average PN-9000GR/Geobook owner, as those that knew what the machines were and what they could (or couldn't) do would probably not be making calls to the tech support line as frequently.
Wow this is amazing, thank you for sharing!!
@@ActionRetro Oh, and a point of clarification since the way I worded that might be ambiguous. There were three GeoBook models that we supported: PN-9000GR, NB60 and NB80C, of which the PN-9000GR was the lowest-end. The model that I got Wolfenstein to run on was the NB-80C.
The NB-80C was broadly the same machine as the PN-9000, but it had a larger color display, VGA port, built-in modem and (if I remember correctly) a marginally more capable web browser. I never tested the hacked Wolfenstein on the PN-9000GR specifically, so I can't say with 100% certainty that it would have run on that one.
@@evilthatiswes Ah cool! Do you remember anything about the key combos to start the machine in stock GEOS, bypass startup scripts, etc?
Two buttons, three buttons, F keys?
Thank you again for sharing!!
@@ActionRetro I'm an old-schooler '89'er, still many questins about how x86 machines ran code so efficiently. How did dailt life go on one of these machines?
@@ActionRetro I've been racking my brain, trying to remember, but it's been over two decades now since I last saw one of these machines. Seems like booting to DOS might have involved hitting F2 or F3 at the right moment on boot, but I'm not sure.
I had a workmate who's daughter told him she was doing bad in school because she did not have a computer. He was our Aston Tate database guy and said she would not have anything to do with that old blue screen junk. He did not want his girl to have access to the internet but wanted her to see him trying to help her with school. He did not have any lose cash as he had been marred 3 times. He ask me if I had any suggestions as what he could do. I sold him an 8086 with PC-Dos and GeOS. She was so happy with the interface and the print output that with her first English paper she got her first A. She got so much feed back from classmates about how her papers looked she started making money selling presentations even for her teachers. She went to go on to collage with her entrance request letters done on that machine. This was in the late "90s.
It appears from the video, that the GeoWorks office suite and the GeoWrite word processor were in functionality equivalent to something like Microsoft Works.
Looks much better and more intuitive than Word for DOS. Apparently, your workmate's daughter mastered the functions of the word processor and became successful with it.
Wholesome.
It looks like it uses the same motherboard as the GeoBook. That's why it has unused pinouts for features that aren't on this model but are on the GeoBook, such as the VGA monitor output and PCMCIA slot.
It's definitry just a cost cut GeoBook. Same SOC with half the ram.
Shame you can't just add the features, but you'd need to locate and solder in all sorts of chips you probably can't buy retail. Still, might be it uses the old Cirrus Logic chip that was in millions of video cards back then, you maybe lift it out and solder it into the Geobook. Well I couldn't, and it's beyond Ben Heck's usual standard. But there are people out there who hand-solder enormous PLCCs over a blacksmith's forge, laughing in a manly way for the duration. Would be pretty nifty to scrap some old 386 stuff and install it there. Not like they were going to pay for a lot of custom chips. The glue's mostly gonna be in the SOC.
Well, it's a pipe dream, anyway... Still CGA has it's own charm. For what it is, that might be best to stick with. I doubt if you installed a VGA chip that it'd work with the existing LCD so what's the point? If you want an external monitor just buy a better computer. Similarly what value would a PCMCIA card be with GEOS that won't have any of the drivers? Did the higher-end machines run DOS or Windows 3.1 or something?
Even the keyboard not working, it's expressing the charm of "PC Comparables" from back in the day. Not-quite PCs, that went tits-up if you tried to bypass the BIOS calls. The famously slow, useless, BIOS calls. Still I'm impressed they included DOS at all, particularly in ROM. Maybe a future range of disk software was an option they kept in mind? In between designing another 30 completely unique and incompatible kinds of jumped-up typewriter.
If IBM had written a decent BIOS to start with, the PC world might look very different now. All sorts of machines, rather than strict clones down to the last transistor. It'd be versatile, you'd be able to divert all sorts of things. Still, Windows does that now, as long as there's a driver...
@@greenaum Rumor has it IBM was in talks with Atari before they went with Microsoft. Judging by the Atari 800, that would definitely have resulted in a decent BIOS! However, most programmers back then hacked the hardware any way they could, partly for performance but partly just because they could. Clones would still have had to have been the same down to the last transistor.
Wouldn't this just be like a "word processor" rather than a "laptop?" When I look at that I just see a modern version of the typewriter sans printer. Wouldn't a "laptop" need a modem?
Calling it now, next video: this is the cursed worst laptop ever, lets upgrade the heck out of it.
First upgrade: a colour screen.
Tear out it's guts and replace them with a modern multi-core processor SBC after the screen swap 😁
@@commentarysheep lol. I'm wondering if a vga port was installed would a VGA output to a CRT work...
Laptop RAID
@@rmcdudmk212 A none functional one would make an interesting Pi project
I remember seeing this being sold at Kmart back in the day, and laughing at them for what they cost at $300, but as a former GEOS user, it is really cool that it does run GEOS Works. I would clean this one up, and keep it original, but if you find another one of these in a bit worse shape, then it might be a cool project to shove a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB with some cooling added on, and a more modern screen in it, and make a retro looking franken laptop.
for their* price* of* $300
it does have some qualities going for it. such as that you can't play leisure suit larry on it. which would be a feature if you were buying it for a slacker.
edit: maybe it can run who knows
Yes! I remember this as well. Right in the front during the Back-to-School section. Along with Brother typewriters and other things.
bought a Tandy Model 200 with exactly that in mind, but the darn thing is still working just fine and I just don't have sufficient resolve to gut a working computer from 1984
Geoworks OS on Pc, little graphical predecessor of windows 3.1 - 95 onwards. Eventually it wasn´t ready for the future as GEOS 2.0 only worked on 386/486 machines, pentium onward installation was imposible unlesss. Breadbox Ensemble ddn´t made it anything better !
GEOS turned into GEOWorks, which was a competitor for Windows 3.0
EDIT: Also, if it has a 386/486, it must run DOOM!
If it has any kind of processor, it must run doom
If someone can put DOOM on a pregnacy tester, it WILL run on anything!
If it has enough RAM, which this doesn't.
@@kintustis if it has screen then it will run doom
@@johntrevy1 There's new FastDoom port for old PCs and runs faster than original release, while having additional features, like supporting text mode, CGA, EGA, etc. and it will run on less than 4 MB of RAM. Although it might crash in-game when using original WAD file on less than 4 MB of RAM. However it's possible to run custom maps that use fewer textures.
This poor Brother machine out here giving Vtec kids computers a run for their money 🤣
Not really though, this is significantly more capable than any of the Vtech machines. Grammatically speaking, it would be the Vtech kids laptops giving the Brother "laptops" a run for their money.
@@awesomeferret I'd say it could be on par with something like the VTECH Equalizer (I recommend looking it up if you don't know what it is), but that one only.
In many ways this was actually way ahead of its time, with the cost reduced and relatively small motherboard with the SoC. This is basically akin to a Surface RT; not horrible or unusable by any means, but not something that you'd want to use unless you had to.
Aha good point
I look at as an overprice, and underpowered netbook of it's time.
@@ActionRetro that MX J9734 chip is a rom chip. It basically acts as your system on a chip, and the CPU is just a CPU.
Nah, the Dauphin DTR-1 came out in 1993 and was basically a prototype low power tablet, it even had a touchscreen!
ua-cam.com/video/DaQR4jk1voQ/v-deo.html
That's your surface RT, as long as it doesn't burn you in the 5 minutes it works
The fact, it isn't really yellowed is astounding
Fun fact: the PC/GEOS operating environment is multitasking, multi-threaded, object oriented, is built upon a foundation of x86 interrupt codes, and can run pretty well even on an 8086 with 640k of RAM. It was a masterful piece of engineering!
It started in Berkeley, CA and an earlier version ran on an Apple IIe. It was advanced when I bought a copy in 1988.
The Brother logos being duplicate, different fonts, and not aligned, is giving me an aneurism
In the mid 1980's I worked for a portrait/photo studio. The resident techie left for a communications company and I was officially a computer operator. I had been a "why do I need a computer?" film photographer, so an evening college course, "Introduction to IBM compatible computers" was next. The studio's computer was an 4.77Mhz 8088 IBM XT running MS-DOS 3, had a 20MB HDD and a 512K full length monochrome display card, with the usual IBM monochrome monitor, The printers were wide carriage dot matrix printers that shook the flimsy table as they nosily consumed fanfold paper by the yard. PFS: Pro Write and File programs, which managed client lists and order forms rounded out my command line world.
All was well until two things happened: A freelance programmer brought pirated versions of XTree and the dBase database programs, which needed color to properly display results. By this time, Computer stores were "everywhere," so I went looking for hardware and software updates. A half length 640K color display card and larger 14 inch color monitor solved one problem, and I bought XTree 4 and dBase to "keep things semi-legal."
Since I was using a clone 80386SX computer running Windows 3.1, I looked for such a program that would take me beyond the command prompt. PC GeoWorks Ensemble 1.0, then 1.2 turned this "dawn computer" into something anyone could use. I even envied the limited set of scalable fonts while Windows 3.x only had pedestrian system fonts. The arrival of Truetype fonts changed my computer world, and, I eventually set the IBM XT aside and used the 80386SX desktop clone to "do Windows." GeoWorks Ensemble was swept aside, but I fondly remember those days when a GUI came to an IBM XT.;)
Only thing I could guess this was for was like a 90s equivalent to a Chromebook, a crappy cheap laptop that can be bought in bulk for businesses and schools on a budget.
You'd be shocked what I get up to on my jailbroke Acer 15" Chromebook. ChromeOS removed and replaced with first Elementary OS, but is now running MX Linux. It's been surprisingly durable, reliable, with good battery life and acceptable performance for everyday use. I wouldn't try to edit video with it (Possible, but painful) and photo-editing isn't its strong suit, but for basic internet, word processing, and media consumption it's absolutely fine. It's got a nice screen, decent internal speakers, and HDMI out. The only physical mod I did was to upgrade the 32Gb internal drive to 250Gb.
@@tarmaque Nice cope for regretting buying a chrome book.
@@orokro_stuff Did it on purpose, with this specifically as a plan. Worked out great.
But they weren't crappy. You could get a lot of work done on them, esp. as a word processor.
@@orokro_stuffchromebooks actually work great as lightweight Linux machines.
If you count the number of pins on the video-out connector, you can tell if it was intended to run on CGA or VGA. From looking at the board, I think it was a VGA machine. Personally, I'd try and soup-up this thing just to see if it could ever have reached it's full potential.
At minimum a color backlit display upgrade
The memory would be a cheap and easy place to start, just double the density of those DRAM chips and it'll probably work. Hard to believe that a 386 couldn't address that much.
@@MistahMatzah It depends mostly on the board design. My 386 had 8mb or ram at the time, so yes, the chip can handle it.
If there is space in the case, I would install sockets and try out stuff.
@@fixyourautomobile Color isn’t necessary, but a better quality monochrome or grayscale panel in a more standard resolution /with a backlight/ would be a serious improvement.
Id sodder some more ram it looked to have 2 empty slots there
Maybe it should have been called the "Binford 9000" (a nod to the 1990's Tim Allen show "Home Improvement")
Action Retro is the real-life, technology equivalent of Rick Sanchez's Curse Purge Plus - Sean takes cursed machines and makes them actually do something.
There is one often overlooked value with a machine like this, it gives no, or at least very limited, possibilities for distractions since gaming on it seems near impossible.
Also, no risk of crashing hard-drive.
Those machines weren’t meant as kid’s laptops or anything, they were the beginning of the extinction of typewriters. Some companies, including Brother, started making electronic typewriters in the 1980s. By the 1990s they included simple LCD screens and floppy drives for limited compatibility with DOS/Wintel text files, and the machines were re-classified as “electronic word processors”. Eventually their specs and software started beefing up to the point where they could be used as a (very) low-end PC and still had printers built into the machines. This type of laptop was being sold in places like Walmart in the second half of the 90s, usually for around $125-$200… far less than even the cheapest laptops. By then the built-in printers disappeared in favor of portability and connectivity to standard PC printers.
So what started off as an electronic typewriter basically evolved into a low-end laptop by the end of the Millenium. For some people who were super broke and in desperate need of a laptop with barebones functionality, these machines were the only solution. Not good per se but better than nothing.
I think this thing is pretty cool. It's about 2 generations old for 1997, so my guess is that it was cheap. Laptops in 1997 were ridiculously expensive, and this would have been a good value for the time, depending on the price. I mean, those built-in apps would have been comparable to what most people were used to at the time, assuming they didn't have the latest and greatest system and apps, and putting everything on ROM like that would have made it pretty snappy and cheap. Honestly, for what this is, I think it's far better than it needed to be. The word processing machines from this era were often not great, and not really intended to be full laptops, so the fact that it lets you run DOS from ROM and load program from floppy is pretty sweet. The display also looks alright for that era... at that time most laptop screen looked really truly terrible, and this is very readable even via a UA-cam video. I like it! If I see one locally I'll grab it!
These Brother "notebooks" (and I use this term loosely) were priced around $300 (or less) at a time when an actual notebook / laptop would cost you probably $2k or more. Brother was attempting to capitalize on the low price of this device for households that didn't have that kind of money to spend, but still wanted to have an on-the-go computer. It's not a great deal considering what you got, but I guess some people could have been lured in by its portability and price tag.
I think a version of this (or maybe this version itself) was sold in Wal-Mart, and for a long time they prided themselves on selling items, "Made in the USA," and would only deal with companies who, well...you know...until it was found out that most of the stuff they dubbed that was actually, "final assembly in the USA," and sometimes was as simple as it got put into a new package after it hit our shores.
I remember seeing these things marketed and even though I knew they were relatively feature locked they were still kinda interesting. There are a few markets I think they might have been going for. One could be an 'evolution' of their word processor lines for people who might have been adverse to buying a fully fledged computer (at the time I knew many adults that refused to use computers), or maybe towards older kids or teens where a parent would want them to only have a computer for schoolwork. This very much looks like something you'd see as the more fully functional version of those kids laptops that had very limited functionality and even smaller LCD displays.
I think this could have been useful for people with very low income if they had fixed some of the bugs a laptop was still very expensive at this time.
It does look like a nice machine to write text on and probably has more battery life than the average Win 95 laptop from the day. Would be very interesting to see if the included Geos applications can be extracted and will work on another machine
Back when I sold computers at Incredible Universe in the 90s, we had similar Geoworks-based "word processors" (really a typewriter with a similar embedded PC and an amber-on-black mono VGA CRT). I managed to get Commander Keen running on one using a similar method.
All laptops were sort of ass for a long time. Very expensive, heavy and poor performance compared to the desktops of the day. Even more so than now.
There was definitely a market for sub-laptop devices for the word processing crowd, which was the "killer" productivity app for those folks.
This thing is late to the market, but not by much. Maybe 2 to 3 years? See devices like the Tandy WP2, Amstrad NC200. This device is special in not being 8 bit though! And double points for GEOS. I am always interested in anything that helps hardware to have a longer life than it 'should'. Great vid 👍
especially considering it was a wysiwyg word processor? I grew up using Wordstar, which was a text based, line command word processor.
@@hengineer indeed! My amstrad "notebook" got me through 5 years of secondary school. I think it was WordStar compatible. My family couldn't have afforded a "real" laptop and the weight and battery life wouldn't have been viable back then anyway ☺️
I can just see the executive with his bright idea now… “If that thing [GEOS] could run on a C64, think what it could do on today’s cheap hardware! We’ll make so much money licensing it out!”
I remember these they were for word processing in 90's and were meant to be basic and very cheap alternative to full PC. In 90's not every one could afford £1500 PC.
I unironically love this thing and think it's pretty cool. For a cheapo laptop, it surely does have a fully fledged OS that isn't Windows.
Great video, though something people forget about Windows 9x PCs in the late 90s was that unless you had a fresh install, Windows itself would "decay", slowing down and crashing more often over the course of a few months. Forgetting to save often enough and losing your document was a common frustration and might explain why niche alternatives popped up from time to time.
Your intro is pure gold. "But... does it have any redeeming qualities? No!"
Awesome video as always!
Cool machine! And it has a 386. . .
It will theoretically run Linux. I'm looking forward to that video. Great entertainment as always. Thanks.
There used to be a Linux distro that ran from a single floppy, I’m sure it still exists and would work perfectly on this
Hah, I can't figure out how to get it to boot from floppy
@@ActionRetro BIOS settings maybe?
@@ActionRetro a lot of older dos systems and embedded ones like this one don’t have a bios, (or the bios is so underpowered it’s not configurable except for hardware switches or data written by the primary OS) the dos system runs bare metal on the device and performs the functions of the bios, which is probably why it’s not running true MS-DOS but instead is running a custom version specifically designed for embedded systems. “GEOS” is just a shell sitting on top of this embedded DOS, giving it a GUI.
some Linux distros for older machines though can be launched from dos, which kickstarts it into its own environment. I’ll do more digging in daylight and see if I can recall the distro I had because it could do that.
@@ActionRetro tbh MS-DOS is essentially Windows' bootloader, and it can most certainly boot other OSes. Linux distros like Caldera OpenLinux used to give you a program that booted up straight into Linux with no reboot, so I'm confident it can be done even if there's no BIOS menu.
When i saw this video, i was like "oh this has got to be a 1 mil subscribers at LEAST yt channel" but no, only 60k! You have the best content keep on doing your thing!
The GeoWorks applications (file manager, word processor, etc.) running on top of DOS were great, and GeoWorks helped keep a motley collection of rather old 286's useful at my high school on into the mid 90s. (If you didn't want to just use WordPerfect on DOS).
TheOldNet modem that you previously featured has a firmware update that adds PPP support
If I saw one of these in the 90's I would expect a $99 price tag. I don't remember seeing them ever tho.
Legit, ty for the pcbway ad. I need some specialty boards for a project and this will save me a lot of time and frustration.
I am also glad to see a company other than the usuals advertising with a channel that doesn't have a million subscribers. More reason for me to support them.
When watching this, I couldn't help but remember my grandpa. He was always fond of technology, having spent much od his life in army (radiocommunication, radars and stuff) but in his later days he simply couldn't grasp the idea of computers, especially Windows-based ones. This one would have been a perfect solution for him - he wanted to write his diary, some appointments, and the like.
It's however interesting that Brother dug the GEOS out from its grave, 10 years after. I was using it in the Commodore environment and it could do much more than that.The productivity apps are actually quite decent. Even more surprising is the coexistence of GEOS with DOS 6.22. Either of these seems like a reduced/custom version that doesn't do any good to the overall compatibility (like custom keymapping that is held nobody knows where, maybe hardcoded in the ROM?) . And yes, with the crappy refresh rate of LCD screens like this one, don't expect it to be any good in any games :)
Interesting device. I remember using GeOS a lot on the Nokia 9000 and 9110 "smartphones" in about the same time period - 1997 or so. They actually had a rather similar hardware spec (386 processor, monochrome screen) but they were pocket-sized and were definitely connected devices, with full internet access, web browsing, email, and integration with the phone.
It doesn't surprise me at all Catacomb fired right up... there is an amazing two-part video series by Dave's Garage where he breaks down the Fast Inverse Square Root algorithm they used in quake3. The engineers at iD software were literal mad scientist masterminds.
That Top Gear reference, talking about old episodes where they drive crap cars in terrible conditions and getting attached, made me think about the emotional journey that was Oliver.
Nice review, thanks for sharing. You can run PPP and a Hayes modem emulator on the Raspberry Pi, this way I connected a Compaq LTE laptop with Windows 95 to the Internet, you only need a Raspberry Pi and a USB-COM for that. I can send a link to the tutorial I did, but links are probably not allowed here. Is there any HDD on this laptop, or only ROM? RAM disk? Investigating such rare systems is actually much more interesting than making 100 times the same retrobright or running Petskii Robots 1001st time, which some popular reviewers do. And this laptop is not the worst, I have a Bondwell laptop with CP/M OS to repair ;)
There's also some dedicated serial-to-wifi adapters built around the ESP8266 (or the ESP32). Of course, all of these are more powerful than this 'laptop' and at that point you could just gut this thing and drive it all off the Pi.
That MX chip is a flashable EPROM, and that's actually where GeOS, ROM-DOS, and all of the pack in software are stored.
Also common in the ECU from cars of the era.
I worked at Sears and we sold these. They were NOT sold as computers (though they were sold in the computer department) they were sold exclusively as “Word Processors”. College students (on a budget) would buy these instead of laptops because of the price. As I recall, the modems allowed you to connect to the school’s network to submit work, etc. remotely.
We didn’t sell many at our store, but they were not intended as computers. Like I said, not everyone could afford a laptop - especially a student. I had a friend who wrote a doctoral thesis on one and the ability to save to a floppy that could be read on a regular PC was great.
Your mocking the product comes from you thinking of it like a computer, which it was not sold as nor intended to replace.
These games are probably calling either BIOS or DOS interrupts for keyboard input, but the code is not according to spec or the key codes are different from what the game is expecting, with maybe locale also being a factor.
The idea of 386DX-powered board running MS-DOS 6.22 with GeOS as GUI, somewhat intrigues me. Thank you for this excellent video 🙋♂
A preliminary look-around suggests that MX J9734 chip may be some sort of reflashable ROM chip. The only information I could find was on an old NES dev forum, but it didn't have the same follow up digits so it may be a different chip altogether.
Yep, I was also thinking it could've been some kind of ROM.
If you searched for 9734 then you just found some other random chip that was manufactured in 34th week of 1997. That's the manufacturing datecode, not the chip type ID. (You can see several other chips on the board with similar 97XX datecodes like 9731 on the CPU, 9721 on the keyboard controller and it matches with the vintage of the BIOS date. Different manufacturers put the codes in different places, so it's not always easy to figure out what number is what on unknown chips, so this is good cross verification.)
@@tylisirn Ahhhh thank you for the clarification
I wonder if it is second processor to run GeOS.
I remember sitting down and working out how these things work email wise, and writing the support documentation for it, I was working at an BBS turned ISP and we could offer connectivity and email via the BBS. Internet was not really true internet, Pop/SMTP and other mail functions were not an option with these. It was all BBS based where the server end did the hard work. It's a text terminal that could access Pine and Lynx!
it looks very similar to my Tandy Model 200, which came out in like 1984 or 85, has an Intel 8085, and a suit of applications in ROM which includes Microsoft's Muliplan spread sheet. Comparable functionality at about 11 to 12 years prior to this Brother
Much easier to operate than your Tandy.
I remember quite liking Geoworks on my computer back in the day; It was better looking that the Windows of the day, and supported longer file names!
You found the Reliant Robin among laptops.
Yesss perfect analogy
Can I say... I like (nay, love) how you use your hands... there's something about it. When you point at things, or make hand gestures... it's just... SUBLIME.
Just wanted to express that.
Great video! I don't think there's another here about this device. You almost make me want to keep mine. Maybe...
My experience is mainly with its succsessor, the NB60 with VGA grayscale and PCMCIA port but I think it's mostly the same. They're great for the intended purpose of a distraction free work environment, and with a pretty good keyboard (I like how all the navigation keys are together and separate from Ins and Del-- fewer mistakes). But if you discover it has DOS you are doomed. Doomed to finding out about upper memory and increasing the files= the in read-only config.sys with device loaders like Devload. Doomed to running GEM and hacking together a keyboard driver to make the keyboard mouse work because the shift keys on these things give the same signal. Doomed to write a batch file that uses text substitution programs to convert GEM's Wordplus files into RTF. Doomed to run GEOS itself from Breadbox, making the thing look and work like Windows 95 by finding the native keyboard driver. Condemned to try Windows 3.x and BasicLinux only to bash your head against that same keyboard. Consigned to finding out all manner of antiquarian nonsense and idly toying with the idea of using FreeDOS as your daily driver, or at least buying a USB-floppy to make the 9000 GR compatible. Most of this won't work on the device featured here due to the lack of storage beyond the 3 1/2" floppy, but you have been warned!
I want to be doomed by all of these things 😂
Side note about those screens, I was frustrated for years that my palm pilots were getting harder to look at. Finally figured it out: CFL and LED bulbs. Try it in front of a nice yellow incandescent sometime, you’ll be surprised.
Yeah, wide-spectrum light makes quite a difference. The warm colour temp can help too since they usually have a green-ish or blue-ish silver backing. Which means cool lights reduce the apparent contrast. Some LEDs are good enough but most are a long way off!
I wonder if the integrated serial port in the chip was really meant for some POS terminal connections or something like that. If you got the internal modem it probably was faster. But it is really strange that this one shipped with the PPP software but nothing that could use it.
The thing it's running isn't really GE/OS, and this is borne out by the fact that it's got DOS underpinning it. The PC version of this is just called "Geoworks," and it's more of an operating *environment* than an operating *system*, much like Windows up through 3.11- it just runs on top of DOS. I used this on a couple of my old PC's back in the early 90's.
What a cool old machine! the display and the computer itself really remind me of an Apple IIc using it's (horrible) LCD display, seems like very much the same experience 😀
And I guess if this to be compared to Top Gear, this is your Oliver!
Hahaha it IS my Oliver!
Seeing that thing brought me back to a time when I knew what the internet was, but didn't know how it worked.
It's nice to visit the old computers and software and kind of reminisce. It gives me a greater appreciation for what I have now and what I had then.
In middle school in the mid 2000s I used an older version of that to program Python at school. When I got home I'd save the text to a floppy, load it into a desktop and try running the code. Before that I'd print off notes at the library and write programs on note-cards, so it was a definite step up.
i almost got one of those for school, but my school thought a "proper" windows machine would be better choice lol, ended with a toshiba satellite
It IS a typewriter. Bet it'll connect to a Brother printer right out the box.
Oh wow... a 386SX at 33Mhz! This was literally the specs of my first ever laptop in either 1997 or 1997 and was painfully slow. I want to say I got it at a local used computer store called Grolen here in town for around $100, but it was super painful to use even after installing Linux. Almost still wish I had it because the display on this Brother device reminds me of how bad the display on my laptop was and it makes me wonder if what I actually had was more similar to this device because it definitely wasn't a typical "name brand" piece of hardware.
As soon as you showed the serial port my interest was piqued... terminal. Actually looking at its built in functions it doesn't seem that bad, I guess it would have suited some 90s users. At least it could still have some occasional use these days if you can get a decent terminal emulator on there though!
I love how brother's product line was apparently laser printers that last for 2 decades and also the worst budget computers ever made.
This is just one of the reasons I love your channel!
I love this video. I owned a copy of GeoWorks Pro in the late 80's. I also had Windows 3.11 and I am sorry to say windows at the time lost out in most ways. The GeoWorks GUI looked great, ran comfortably on a low power 286 with limited RAM had a good suite of apps (Word Processor, Spread sheet "Quattro Pro" a few simple games, a drawing app I loved etc.) The spreadsheed was an addon they shipped with the GUI but it was able to be run in a mode that looked a lot like Geos. Also a little known these days is that Geos GUI was licensed out as the First GUI for AOHell, and AOL shipped with Geoworks Pro. I did not like AOL at first because it was a pain to get local connections with a modem that was faster than 2400 BPS. But the Geoworks Pro was great. Had they been a little more open with the ability for software developers, I feel it would have been a great contender for MS Windows. The drawing app had the ability to rotate text in any direction, very well defined print output even to a nine pin dot matrix printer. Anyway thanx for the video it was a great look back in time.
Your personality makes my day hehehe thanks! I was ironically Googling this thing the other day.
It was 1/3 ro 1/5th the price of a standard laptop back in the day. Not to mention it had the office apps built in, for no extra cost. Not a total ripoff, but still rather skimpy on the specs.
I love the little jokes thrown in throughout the newer videos lol
Pretty sure this was aimed at schools and students and is based on PC/GEOS. Was for lower end of the market aiming for people not available to afford the newer computers of the time. Like the Pentium 133 and 166 which were the standard machine types then.
Edit: I had a 386 laptop with a similar LCD screen. 1. It works best under old school yellow incandescent bulbs.
2. I needed mouse trails turned on , as it got blurry with fast screen draws. I had same issue as you with it
Your sponsor should charge YOU money for doing their ad with that monstrosity of a "laptop" in the same frame.
They made a killing on any of those they sold. That's 1992 technology mated to one of their word-processing device screens and sold for almost the price of a real 1997 laptop. Surface-mounted 386 motherboards were available dirt cheap in the 1993-95 time period and would have been available in bulk for very little in 1997, especially with a 386SX-33 in place of the usual DX-40.
At the very least, they could have made sure the keyboard mappings worked in DOS, so you could use it as a DOS PC.
This laptop is like if a word processor woke up one day and said "I have had all I can stand, and I can't stands no more!" ate some spinach, and then got as beefy as a word processor could ever get. This is peak word processor performance. You might not like it, etc. etc.
The intros are getting funnier each week!
Larger LCD's were made of smaller LCD panels multiplexed together. That aspect ratio was common before people began combining displays.
My guess for the weird aspect ratio is that it displays CGA's 640x200 resolution using square pixels. Most CGA-compatible LCD displays doubled the horizontal lines and displayed 640x400 with square pixels instead, so they'll end up with an aspect ratio closer to normal. But that requires a 640x400 display which I guess was expensive.
It would be interesting to pull that version of DOS and GEOS off of thte ROMs and get it running on a standard 386 PC with a slightly better graphics system.
This thing makes the Texas Instruments TravelMate line look like a workstation, geez.
Cidco Mailstation is another oddity from 1999, pitched at elders and others who were non tech, the documentation bundle that comes with it is an inch thick and wou.d have been intimidating.
The hardware is a very cool CMOS Z80 system (HD64180 or Z180 !), battery operable and modifisble. well worth acquiring for pennies.
Holidiing Shift Function F5 during startup brings up the QA test menus which includes a modem AT terminal acreen :)
Also a hex memory editor which allows hand insertion of a 97 byte loader program which allows a Laplink cable to be attached to the printer port and apps loaded from PC :)
Oh god, we had this when I was a child. Not sure where we got it. But I remember it very clearly now that I see it on screen. Didn't remember anything about it other than how it looked and the screen on it being... the way it is. Still, pretty weird given how young I am compared to when this released. I wasn't even born yet.
I bet it was for word processing mainly since is made by a typewriter company, every thing else is to justify the cost.
Word processing, spreadsheets, e-mail. What more did you need back then anyway? At least with these things, you had a stable machine you could work done on. Unlike the Win 95 shit at the time.
You've got to get a vga header soldered on there and see if you can populate the empty chips. Upgrade it!!!! 😆
My man, I very nearly choked on and spit my coffee all over my living room at that intro. 10/10 😂
The intent of this device was to compete with dedicated word processor machines. Hence the unusual aspect ratio of the screen. So it wasn’t even designed to compete with the far more expensive Win9x laptops of its day. Do I don’t think it was scummy, just a different target audience.
I used to run GeoWorks Ensemble on my PC back in the early '90s. It worked like a charm. I had a full desktop suite that would work on way lower specs than for instance Windows 3.11 or Windows 95.
I don't see anything at all wrong with this machine. It's a wp first and foremost. It was never meant for gaming.
It isn't really a bad laptop, just misunderstood. Brother was making word processors and the laptop above on a budget. Remember back in the 90s, PCs and laptops were ridiculously expensive. A typical Windows or Mac laptop would run you THOUSANDS of dollars, while Brother's word processors and again, said laptop, would run you hundreds. Even trading off features would still make them worthwhile, even if you couldn't run solitaire and minefield.
Oh man, that knockoff Chicago font inside the main OS! It’s actually quite appealing. I mean, it’s still not as good as real low-res Chicago. But it’s still pretty nice.
Getting this thing on the web would be a massive Rube Goldberg experience.
When the camera zoomed in on the brother logo, I heard Hulk Hogan in my head
That brings back memories. I had one on loan in junior high school for taking notes. My first ever laptop. My uncle once told me it was a regular DOS system. Keeping in mind I was in middle school at the time, I thought I could run an old DOS game, right? I bricked the system and obviously my teacher wasn’t happy. Lol
Looking at the internal construction you can see a spot for a hard drive, math co-pro, more RAM and ROM and probably a VGA controller.
I bet this exact machine and board have seen use as a full-fat DOS laptop as well as this cut-down version.
Didn't think I would ever see Hoovie's Countach on this channel
To be fair, it would've been considered mobile at the time, and for somebody like my mother, she probably would've preferred the simplicity coming from typewriters. Realistically, this would've provided for her computer demands just fine at the time. In 94, Radio Shack was selling a 386SX PC full-system for $1399, or an 1110 HD "Notebook PC" for $699 with an 8088 CPU with an ever worse LCD than that Brother thing.
I think they were aiming to make an easy-to-use PDA that could double as a typewriter. Then when you get to the office, you could plug it in to your printer and spit out the paper, which made it real (at the time).
Also if the scan codes were fixed and they didn't slap that lame geos on it, I could see it being a fun little toy for little me on a road trip, especially if GW BASIC runs on it.
I remember Geos made the Commodore64 quite tolerable. I'm also pretty sure, it took three full minutes to boot off the 5.25 disk. What I do miss about those days is the NLQ printers. A good one was less than $200, and an ink ribbon was less than $6, and lasted a long time.
Going back a bit: "Worst laptop [computer] ever made"? Nahh! One that didn't typically run any kind of GUI would be in that category (a DOS-like-only one, but then you'd have to dial in from there).
One of the VERY few companies that say Made in the USA that actually admit to it not being fully made in the USA
I liked your report/video! Redeeming quality: it work!!! Great review!
That WiFi converter box is pretty cool! But what's on the other end of that cable in it: just USB power?
Almost all budget devices had pretty decent keyboards those days whilst today, even high end devices have laughable horrible keyboards.
Can it even run Zork? I mean that thing is pretty, like, word processor from 1989...
The smudges, amusingly, did make me try to clean my monitor to remove them.
I like vintage tech garbage, but there is some stuff that even those of us who defy planned obsolescence can't fight for.
If you can populate those empty slots, and find the firmware/software/Oscar The Grouch-ware to power them, I'd be interested...
Otherwise.
Ick.