PC Archeology: This 286 laptop has nothing to do with Nissan (Altima Systems)
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- Опубліковано 22 лип 2024
- It's been a while since we did an episode of PC Archeology and I thought this funny old mystery laptop was perfect for us to dig into. Let's tour this machine and dig into what it was used for and how it works.
Altima One
Altima 2 Two
0:00 Intro
1:02 Tour
7:54 First boot and exploration of the drive
26:33 Exploring the manufacturer of this laptop
37:06 Disassembly and teardown
44:57 Data recovery
54:46 Conclusion
-- Links
Altima One review:
www.muzines.co.uk/articles/al...
General Adrian's Digital Basement channel:
/ discord
My Github Repo (with ROM dumps and images)
github.com/misterblack1/plexu...
Plexus P/20 Brochure:
www.bitsavers.org/pdf/plexus/b...
Plexus Unix:
www.bitsavers.org/pdf/plexus/b...
MFM emulator:
www.pdp8online.com/mfm/mfm_ol...
Fujitsu Hard Drive Brochure:
archive.org/details/bitsavers...
Omti 5200 Manual:
oldcomputers.dyndns.org/publi...
Adrian's Digital Basement Merch store:
my-store-c82bd2-2.creator-spr...
Adrian's Digital Basement ][ (Second Channel)
/ @adriansdigitalbasement2
Support the channel on Patreon:
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My GitHub repository:
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-- Tools
Deoxit D5:
amzn.to/2VvOKy1
store.caig.com/s.nl/it.A/id.16...
O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)
amzn.to/3a9x54J
Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:
amzn.to/2VrT5lW
Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:
amzn.to/2ye6xC0
Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:
www.rigolna.com/products/digi...
Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:
amzn.to/3adRbuy
TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM programmer: (The MiniPro)
amzn.to/2wG4tlP
www.aliexpress.com/item/33000...
TS100 Soldering Iron:
amzn.to/2K36dJ5
www.ebay.com/itm/TS100-65W-MI...
EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:
www.eevblog.com/product/121gw/
DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:
amzn.to/2RDSDQw
www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Logic-DS...
Magnetic Screw Holder:
amzn.to/3b8LOhG
www.harborfreight.com/4-inch-...
Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)
www.ebay.com/itm/14-16-18-20-...
RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)
www.retrotink.com/
Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)
www.ebay.com/itm/1-2-5-10PCS-...
Heat Sinks:
www.aliexpress.com/item/32537...
Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)
amzn.to/3b8LOOI
--- Instructional videos
My video on damage-free chip removal:
• How to remove chips wi...
--- Music
Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino - Наука та технологія
Seems like Thomas Cokenias is an actor now. If you read his resumé it says he has an electrical engineering degree and "Most of my career I helped electronic equipment manufacturers identify and correct electromagnetic interference problems". Seems fitting.
That's quite a career change :D
I used Vernier’s Graphical Analysis in high school, along with TI Graph Link for TI-82, for both math and science classes. Brought back memories seeing it in that laptop. Nice to see that Vernier is still in business. Cool find!
What did the graph link software do? Let you hook the calculator to your computer and upload stuff to it?
@@volvo09Yes, it also let you backup items from the calculator (including, IIRC, data tables) and take screen shots. Some of our assignments required us to show the graphed data.
Similar. I remember using alter versions of the Pasco software in my college freshman physics labs. I think it was a mac version? I might be getting it confused with software we used in the upper class labs.
I never fail to be amazed at all the accumulated knowledge Adrian has. I don't understand half of it, but I enjoy hearing it anyway.
He also has the patience of a saint when it comes to this type of stuff. If I ran into this many issues I'd be finding my nearest recycling center.
It makes me feel brainy when I watch his videos 😊
@@PaulinesPastimes Maybe you are brainy! Probably more brainy than I am, anyway. I'm happy to know a bit about everything.
@@andoletube Me too!
@@PaulinesPastimes Im learning englisch with his videos and more about older computers. Its easy to understand, but speaking to others, may i learn a lot about technical stuff, but not how to have a conversation. (-:
"Back in the day, programming EPROMs required very expensive data I/O hardware or specialized hardware" …or a Z88 laptop which used EPROMs as disk cartridges! I remember having to go over to my school's Electronics lab to use the UV eraser when I ran out of space, or at a push, leave my cartridges on the window-sill for a day. I'd then get the little silver labels used to write protect 5.25" floppies to protect the EPROM packs from erasure.
That hard drive looks like it had source code for some of those applications! That's a gold mine of history. It's a huge relief you were able to image it.
Hopefully it can be made available.
I’m mixed. I absolutely understand the interest, but I’d really not be comfortable with my stuff from a bunch of years ago being published online, even if personal information was stripped.
Hey Adrian, when I was younger I built several EEPROM programmer boxes made for parallel ports, and the reason behind it is it was very easy to write code in assembler to toggle bits directly on parallel ports and made it very simple to program EEPROMs as long as they didn't require super fast programming speeds. Back then parallel ports were the way to go for such things, and as you mentioned, there were also several very expensive programming devices that existed that used the parallel port as well.
Vernier makes software and equipment for data collection in science education. They also sell curriculum materials for using their stuff in the classroom. I used to use their equipment when I taught high school chemistry.
The form you found looks like one of their lab report forms for a physics class.
I noticed Wikipedia mentioned the company was started by a physics teacher and his wife in their home, so the address listed in these programs may have always been a single-family dwelling? They maybe moved to the current office once they needed more space.
Sitting backing up data from a Toshiba T1200 I just got the hard drive going on, using laplink to transfer via serial. Listening to Adrian going thru a similar battel. Very reassuring and encouraging.
Turbo Assembler, Turbo Pascal, and others... whoever was using this was pretty technical!
One of my classmates used nearly the same hard- and softwaresetup at this time! He programmed almost all freeware DOS-Tools for us. i still got them on an usb-stick somewhere!
@@talideon I lived off Borland tools. The turbo debugger was life-changing
@@granitepenguin Yeah and this was predating IDA Pro (before it got really good) for a number of years.
I re-wrote a multi-player (one player at a time, though) BBS-ready computer game in Turbo Pascal. The game had originally been written in TRS-80 Color Computer BASIC and operated as a dial-up game.
(Galactic Conflict by Paul Alger, in case anyone remembers it. He sent a listing to Rainbow magazine which was for CoCo programming, and it was featured in an article in the magazine).
@@melkiorwiseman5234 Cool. Turbo Pascal was very commonly used even by other folks like Epic MegaGames. Jazz Jackrabbit was programmed in Turbo Pascal (as it needs the TP7 patch to fix the divide by zero error for running on fast computers).
Ever since I got some fancy earbuds I have just been binging this channel for like a week. God I love stuff like this. makes me wish I could find some places throwing stuff away to just prod around for fun.
At 33:42, you can see two flip-out legs hidden in those two recesses at the back of the machine, which, when extended, would probably allow it to rest on those front pads you mentined at 5:46
From the BIOS page 2 screen, the motherboard can configure the extra memory above the first megabyte as EMS instead of XMS. This is why there was no XMS memory available. The "640-1024K relocation" was a parameter that allowed the motherboard to remap the upper 384KB of RAM to the addresses immediately above the 1MB limit. So a system with only 1MB of RAM installed would then get 640KB of base memory + 384KB of XMS. Enabling that parameter could however sometimes prevent to access the rest of the RAM if more than 1MB was installed (which is the case here). I'd suggest toggling off this parameter, as well as EMS memory support. Upon boot, this would give you access to all extra RAM as XMS. You can then re-enable the EMS support and decide how much to allocate to it. I know about this because I owned a Commodore 286 machine in the earty nineties that had a BIOS that was nearly identical to this.
My PACK-MATE 286 (PB800) has that exact BIOS and I’m looking for upgradable memory for it.
You can tighten up the keyboard cable by winding it in the opposite direction. Just twist the cable until it starts to coil the other direction and keep twisting until it's fully wound that way and it should be very tight.
I made a lot of money buying "non working" Conner hard drives and repairing them in the early to mid 90s. I only bought them if they spun up and paid no more than $1 each. Often they had been tested when jumpered wrong. Sometimes they had been formatted while they were in a system that didn't have a correct BIOS setting. And, I had a device called "the conner" that plugged into the maintenance pins and could redo factory low level formatting and pairing a circuit board with a different HDA. Less than one out of a hundred were unrepairable and I could resell them with a warranty to computer refurbishers for decent money.
20:38 PCTools did become Norton Utilities when Norton bought out Central Point
That hard drive had the classic dead-cat-bounce... and you just used up one of its last lives. 🙂
Haha. It worked just long enough before that last life was used up!
@@adriansdigitalbasementshould've used norton ghost or similar to dump the contents to a new drive.. ope
I've been using Norton Ghost perhaps as long ago as 16 years.. so quick and easy to dump those drives for backup.
But maybe there is something better now.. that's more like DOS
@@adventureoflinkmk2 but... he did copy the contents
@@BenState a drive image could save files that had been deleted but not yet overwritten. Probably nothing interesting but you never know.
You should try to get ahold of Vernier Software and see if they know what this laptop was used for. If nothing else, they'd probably get a kick out of seeing it again.
Vernier makes software, sensors, etc. for science and math education. I also recognize the standard experiments that were listed in that menu, takes me back. I used their stuff both as a student and a teacher. My first job as a teacher I had an apple II (in the 2000s!!!) with vernier software, light gates, etc, because why would anybody replace something that works lol
And of course we also had modern equivalents at that and other schools. Very popular stuff.
@@irollWe used modern Vernier light gates at my school with our Chromebooks.
2MB 30-pin SIMMs did exist, but were uncommon. I suspect the Altima 2 uses 4x 2MB SIMMs to reach 8MB, and there’s probably a jumper somewhere to disable the motherboard’s on-board memory.
Just came to say this. There were also 4mb sticks
In the early nineties, I drove around with my 286/386 desktop, mouse and keyboard in the boot of my car. I drove it inside on a small trolley and connected it to the clients' monitor. I always checked which monitors were available before getting underway and I never forgot my floppy with monitor- and printer drivers. A copy of that floppy sometimes got the 'systems' guy on board. Life has gotten better the last 30 years.
I remember q-Edit. One of my customers used it to write batch files for the university mainframe. The guy dialed into that mainframe by rhythmically slamming the two plungers on top of his rotary phone to produce the modem number. Because it saved time...
Pulse dialing the hard way.
@@gmirwinteenagers in the UK learned how to do that with payphones. The tone dialling was disabled on the unit itself until you entered money, but the exchange had no way to know so it didn’t reject pulse dialling received from the line!
@@kaitlyn__L On this side of the world, the microphone on the receiver was disabled until you had inserted money and the money had dropped. Later on, there was a deliberate delay introduced so that there was around a second's delay between lifting the receiver and being connected, so you couldn't dial by using the receiver hook.
Some people were using pay phones as a "paging system." They'd arrive at where they needed to be picked up, then use a pay phone to dial home, let it ring once or twice, then hang up. That would be the signal for the person at home to get in the car and go collect the person, but without the cost of actually making a call.
@@melkiorwiseman5234 that’s a lot more clever to evade fee-avoiders! That thing about the microphone, did that also prevent the common hack here of asking someone to call you from home at the phone box?
Here, the “paging“ thing was either done by the receiver hook trick, or more commonly by placing a reverse charge call (collect call, in American) and having the person on the other end know ahead of time to deny the charge.
@@kaitlyn__L Yes, the microphone was generally locked out until money was inserted, although I presume the operator had a way of bypassing that if you wanted to make a free call such as a directory enquiry. I'm not sure exactly how it worked since it was a bit before I began to learn how such things worked. I only knew of the main effect.
Cloning and replacing failing hard drives has been a persistent drumbeat at my job, and the anxiety of waiting to see if it will complete or throw an error makes this hard to watch. Damn you Toshiba!
The company where I worked acquired another company, and we had to integrate their infrastructure into ours. There was this PC that had been running 24/7 since 1994 (and it was 2009). I figured it was a good idea to clone the hard drive before even transporting the thing.
When I took out the drive and connected it to my laptop, the drive was unreadable, and a little bit of panic ensued, as this PC handled emergency buttons that some elderly wear around their neck, in case of a medical emergency like a heart attack.
There was one last resort: In the PC, the drive had been oriented on its side, so figuring that drive had been running on its side for 15 years straight, I put the drive on its side, reconnected it to my laptop, and behold, it worked.
This HDD is valuable. It is like a slice of pc history.
What a find! Restoring this machine to an operating condition ought to qualify as field work in archeology! 😆 So very well done!
"Molten Music Technology" UA-cam channel is a British bloke who made music computers for studios for decades. He will have additional insight.
Maybe it’s just me, but seeing a drive labeled “RIP”, I instantly would assume the previous owner knew it was a drive on its last leg and I was working with an active time bomb of a dying drive. Thus, immediately try to get the data off the drive. I trust Adrian wholeheartedly, but definitely was flirting with danger there lol.
I wonder if Vernier was started in their garage and that original address was just their home address.
Or the founder's parent's house.
I was thinking exactly the same!
Wikipedia mentions it was started by a couple in their home (one was a physics teacher and wanted better science teaching tools), so yes it was probably family dwellings even back then!
50:00 - This whole section of getting the drive connected and reading is exactly the kind of thing I love this channel for.
The Conner HDD from my childhood 486 does this too and I set it aside with the hope of trying something else later.
Now I have a reason to. Nice dive in, Thanks!
My favorite channel has done it again! Another great one! I don’t even care that you always say without further ado and then have us watch some ado(theme song/intro)😂.
That disk duplication program would've likely saved them a lot of work(or allowed to cut out a middleman duplicator) when wanting to make a lot of copies of a new program. They could make a master disk of the program they just made, load in the dupe program, load the master disk into it and leave the computer to do the rest, just as long as you remember to slap in a new disk every once in a while.
Obviously, it was used for a lot more than that, but you can see how massively useful that'd be.
Yep. Old "laptop" computers were initially very poor in comparison to the desktop systems of the day. But it's a symptom of "if they want it, somebody will build it." The demand was there, and business critters kept buying them, so the innovation kept on a rolling.
Luggable = Lovable & huggable
Hey Adrian! Your videos rock.🎉
Vernier makes a myriad of scientific measurement devices currently used in STEM courses. I've been able to use many different chemistry related probes. Vernier is a fantastic company that makes great scientific probes and treats its customers very well!
^Vernier employee detected :)
This is so cool, thanks for putting this out 😁🙏🙋♂️
I couldn't imagine anyone using this computer for music production when lots of musicians used Atari ST computers.
at 6:18
You didn't mention the "FUnkenstört nach DBP" and the TüV Certificate, which means that this machine could have been sold in West Germany at the time as well...
Wouldn't it be a QWERTZ keyboard then?
@@Nukle0n Minor change...
And might not have been the case at the time necessarily. So its possible that they sold that Device with or without a QWERTZ Keyboard in W-Germany.
@@Nukle0n Well, just use a different keyboard then. This machine was build with a removeable keyboard after all. They probably delivered it with different keyboards depending on the country.
5:30 You can lift the back of the machine if you have the movable stands on the back like on the picture 33:45
I worked in a computer room during that period. The network techs had a computer that looked just like that with a network analyzer card installed. I never paid attention to the computer name but the machine was identical and may have been the 3rd generation with the 16-bit buss to support the data-aquisition card.
I think the Altima brand was passed around a bit in the early 90's but I learned a hard lesson when as the IT Manager, I convinced my office to go portable with laptops and selected something like 30 Altima branded laptops. The Altima machines were 50 to 100 percent cheaper than name brands like Compaq or NEC. Unfortunately, after a few months of use something like 20% of the devices were dead and the ones still working were not holding up well. After that experience I stayed far away from unknown brands. (I have a vague recollection that "Anypc" was remote control software)
Up to 100 percent cheaper? So they were free? I don't think you know how percentages work
@@hustla818maybe they threw in freebies if you bought enough! Which is a sure sign to stay away of course, but a newbie manager might not know that.
@@hustla818 lol
@@hustla818 Apparently not :D. I could get between 50% and 100% more laptops if I purchased the Altima rather than Compaq or NECs (The other ones I was looking at) so I guess I should have said 33 to 50 percent cheaper :shrug: lol
I am familiar with those Conner hard drives, they were commonly used by Olivetti because they had a factory in Italy. You have to be careful because they predates the IDE standard and may die if you connect them to a modern controller... or they may kill the controller (you may want to check your USB adapter)
Some of the Conner hard drives had a jumper to select IDE/ATA mode of operation.
The sound of that keyboard makes me so happy.
Great episode on a piece of hardware i'd never seen before!
Cool-looking machine, glad it was working!
I love the form factor like that idk why just love them think i had something like that to play with as a toy when very little.
Missed a golden opportunity to call this model the Altima Thule 2 and cash in on the Connan fan base 😁
Hi Adrian, why didn’t you image the raw partition of this machine instead of using xcopy? There mogh be deleted data in the drive that could be retrieved. Similarly to what you did for the unix machine. With 9Mb of free space you might find some interesting stuff in it
Oh and with those USB to IDE Adaptors:
I had no luck with those on old IDE Drives, seems like those, for me, only worked with very new, big drives with multiple GIgabytes of capacity.
SO more for E-IDE, not IDE, sadly...
Oh and with old IDE Drives, I mean something like 2GB or below... But bigger drives such as 15GB ones work fine.
So maybe the USB Adaptor forces UDMA/33??
@@Stefan_Payne Pretty sure the reason is that the adapter tries to send the ATA IDENTIFY DEVICE command to the drive (telling the host/adapter the C/H/S or LBA configuration), which these old drives don't support.
@@seritools This adapters, at least these I have, are external IDE controllers. They send nothing, the OS is responsible for everything. For me new Windows doesn't support CHS IDE addressing any more, so it cannot access it.
And especially Conner drives who had a reputation to be really finicky in their IDE interface. If you wanted to have a second hard disk on the same bus, you better got another Conner, since pairing them with anything else was all but guaranteed to work.
When they worked, they worked great, but they didn't play well with other manufacturers.
@@seritools The drive is identified as Conner Peripherals so the identify command must be older than you are thinking.
I saw that the Connor drive from 1990 was going to be a problem once I saw it was type 17 and not 47 in the BIOS. That's your first big clue that this is a drive from before the ATA-1 standard was ratified, and while IDE has been around since about 1986/1987 it was a bit of a wild-west back then.
The original IDE was a Western Digital thing and everyone followed/copied.
In the very early days, IDE had an 8-bit and 16-bit bus variant. The 8-bit version tied several lines (including the upper parallel data bits) all to ground on the connector, and newer controllers are totally oblivious to this so variant because it's "extinct". Several drives from back then even had an "XT mode" to drop it down into doing 8-bit IDE.
I don't know about this particular Connor but I do know Connor drives from that era are very finicky about newer controllers.
It's fun to see the stuff you work on and discover, Adrian, even if it makes me feel old! :)
The trouble with these Conner drives is they can translate many drive configurations, heads, cylinders etc to what is physically in the drive, so if you then try and access it with a different set of parameters that also equals the drive capacity (or near enough) you will not be able to read it. The actual drive had four heads, so a track zero of a five head translation would take one and a bit native tracks to store, so if you tried to access it with different parameters then the track zero would be the wrong size, and everything following it would be offset is increasing amounts as you moved to higher tracks, so hence a total garbled read with the wrong parameters.
I've seen a couple of these machines in use.
Yes to the battery back-pack. The two recesses on the back contained legs that would tilt the whole machine up so that the beveled front was level with athe desk to give a bit of height to the monitor rather than trying to focus on something that was too low to be comfortable.
Whatever else was on the machine, they made excellent serial terminals for diagnostic work.
that was a huge close call with the hard drive!
That's a proper laptop from the late '80s and early '90s! And 16MHz was pretty fast for a 80286 of those days. In addition, Samp would have had to be able to bring the third revision of this system to market quickly because of the (external) similarities between the 80286 and the 80386SX.
The reason you were unable to properly read the harddrive a couple of times even after you'd turned off the block transfers, probably also has to do with the geometry the (XT-IDE) BIOS chooses when automatically detecting the drive. Type 17 was probably the most "compatible" choice for the early Phoenix BIOS the machine came with. I noticed that for that type, the number of cylinders is 977, whereas the number of cylinders the Connor drive itself reported on the sticker was 980 if I'm not mistaken.
Do you think that those images coukld have been indvidual CMYK plates for their product literature or packaging?
Thanks Adrian!
USB to IDE adapters never work with old drives like this, they require drives that supports LBA. (And even some drives that do support LBA still don’t work with these)
These drives, just like early Quantum ones have a disintegrating rubber bumper inside, that’s why the heads got stuck and it spun up and down. If you aren’t afraid to open up the drive it’s actually possible to fix that problem. I fixed a slightly newer Conner that I got for my collection which had that issue recently.
Its very easy to reverse wind the coiled cable to a tight turn config; takes under 5-mins
Takes under 5 minutes for someone who knows what they're doing*
Golly, that brought back memories:
I must have set up that menu program a hundred times.
Was surprised it didn't have X-Tree or Norton Commander on it.
Thanks Adrian.
In that article, it showed Voyetra Sequencer Plus software, which I remember using back in the DOS days for music production. Fun times.
that is a real treasure trove
*Big Altima Energy*
Back in 2002, when I began my job as a computer science engineer, I used to have a tower and a 14" crt computer with me when I had to go to customers ^^ So this kind of laptops were still portables in those times ^^
Running old 3.5" harddrives upside down can kill them.
Ah the good ol' days of sloppy head actuator mechanisms.
this laptop hit me at a red light.
Oh, the glories of Compuserve.... back when we paid by the minute (and it was expensive!) and so you had to purchase an offline reader or else you'd go broke.
Stopped at the ND State Surplus center in Bismarck last month, picked up an HP Elitebook 2021 vintage laptop for 180 bucks, installed Windows 11 on it and she flies, very happy with my latest buy
My SLT286 used that power connector on the hard drive too, in fact it looked very similar (20 meg). Those USB ide adapters don’t seem to like vintage hard drives
I rather like this period of "portable" computers and recently acquired the oldest in my collection yet, the Ericsson Portable PC from 1985. Looks pretty much like this Altima and the Compaqs design-wise with a removable keyboard. It has a 8088 processor, 512kb of memory and a printer(!) intergrated on the back. Apparently it is the first portable that used the orange/amber plasma display and unfortunately it has the dreaded lines on it. Hope to fix it in the future one way or the other. Fortunately it has a removable battery as well which had not leaked. Great vid and love to see these oldies get some love as well.
I think it was dropped at one point and someone tried to repair the screw posts.
I remember IDE hard drives from Connor having some frustrating compatibility issues that generally weren't present with other brands of hard drives back then. Some controllers just couldn't make any sense out of them. I don't know what special thing Connor was doing.
Oh yes, the joy of working with Conner drives. Trying to make them work with a non-Conner drive on the same bus was a nightmare. Some combinations worked when Conner was the master, some worked when the other was the master, some didn't work at all. Best bet was always to pair them up with another Conner drive.
Controllers were less of an issue back in the day, I never had one from the same time as the drive not working. But more modern controllers are probably a totally different story
I remember working with laptops and portables in the early 90's and by then we were seeing some of the early machines like the Toshiba T1000 (1987) already being demoted to menial tasks. We had one connected to a braille printer via serial and reproducing materials for our braille correspondence course. It took a long time to laptops to catch up with desktops.
I remember seeing a workstation laptop around 2000 which also had a removable keyboard, so it's not a one-of-a-kind design. If memory serves me right, that laptop had a wireless keyboard, which of course makes it more useful.
Conners did that all the time. The first thing I'd do with a Conner back in the day was tap it on the back and see if I could dump the drive.
It’s interesting to see pasco and vernier worked together, both companies offer data acquisition equipment for the educational market, the university I work at when I was in the physics department we actually used pasco in the teaching labs but one professor used vernier for outreach and in class demos using their portable data acquisition handheld. Some of the sensors were compatible and both companies mentioned it. I had even found some of the older pasco computer interfaces from the 90s that hadn’t been used in many years by the mid 2000s.
I had an Altima One, obtained from a junk seller in the early 2000's. It had a fairly high resolution glossy screen, like your Two, though it wasn't VGA I'm pretty sure - maybe EGA, or Olivetti; I remember Windows 3.0 could run in 640x350 or 640x400 or something. The door on the display holds a serial mouse (not connected, you have to take the mouse out of the display and plug the other end of the cable into the serial port on the side). I put a Sound Blaster in the ISA slot in mine, and it worked well (though you need headphones or separate speakers). A very unique laptop, with a very readable display, pretty high contrast for the time.
I had the same problem with a PATA to USB adapter branded "Startech", which looked identical to your "Cables to Go". After repeated failures, I eventually threw it away.
My family had a 13" Sampo CRT TV. It was great and lasted forever. We had it at home for years, then my older brother took it to college for four years, and then I took it to college for five years. I don't remember what happened to it after that.
You got the drive working! wow, impressive trouble shooting
Fun fact. Sampo is very known for to be in Finnish folk mythology, it was a wonderfull mill like machine wich produce riches to its owner
I remember Quick Edit. That was a fully customizable text editor that came Setup using Wordstar commands. There was a text file you could customize to change every single command and operation of the text editor that when edited, you ran a qedit compile that embedded the custom command file into the exe file. BITD I actually purchased a copy of Zsoft pc paintbrush before Microsoft grabbed it.
I recall using Vernier software in the physics lab at my university in the mid 1990's, we has IBM PS/2's on roll-away carts...we used it to measure the local speed of gravity in a vacuum!
The condition of the machine's moving parts definitely has Big Altima Energy to it. It'd be interesting to see what could be done to repair them.
"music laptop" mentioned, and Yamaha C1 was the first thing I thought of. I would love to see a teardown / restoration of one of those.
love a bit of hardrive discovery
5:45 There are those big cutouts on the back that look to be about the right size to hold two feet that could prop up the case to the right angle to make it sit on that front bezel. Just like keyboard feet but way longer, and rotating 180°.
That really takes me back lol , in the article it shows Voyetra Sequencer Plus which had an 8 bit (later 16) midi interface card. , I used this to great effect in my resording studio in the late 80's in to early 90's , was overtaken by Ataris running Cubase.
Stack was a really cool program I used for a LONG time. It was brought up with the prt scr command I think or page up in dos you could save commands in it for quick execution and I think it also remembered old commands though I might be wrong there. I used it and HDIR and DIRMAGIC a LOT.
My first laptop had this exact "altima" logo on it - but it was released maybe in 1997 and had a DSTN 800x600 display (atrocious) and came with 32MB of RAM and a Pentium (non MMX) CPU running at 133MHz. It was meant to run Win95, but I soon got rid of that and installed SuSE 5.2. The hardware was probably made by Clevo, because certain Clevo manufactured laptops (Tuxedo Computers) came in the exact same garishly decorated cardboard boxes as that ancient "altima" laptop.
The requirement for manual CHS configuration in the hard drive adapter doesn't surprise me that much. Most "IDE" controllers you see (including USB ones) are actually ATA (PATA, or parallel ATA).
Although ATA and IDE use the same cable, they are not identical. ATA has a standardized set of commands and includes features for auto-identification of connected equipment. Whereas IDE was pretty much a single-cable version of the old ST-506 interface, and needs to be configured accordingly.
IDE drives also don't support logical block addressing. DOS needs to provide actual cylinder/head/sector (CHS) numbers. If they numbers don't align with they physical disk geometry (how it was low-level formatted), then you will end up reading the wrong blocks, resulting in garbage data and I/O errors.
I agree with what you're saying towards the end about how these were pretty bad 'laptops' in the day, very compromised, terrible performance.. now.. I do have an old IBM ThinkPad a20m I'm pretty sure that's the model) with the red button on the bottom key row for the 'trackpad' mouse thing.. It's the 'new' era of laptops and really when they became much MUCH closer to a useable portable system.. It was my mother in law's, she was a chemistry teacher for 30 years and they let her keep this thing, probably from around 2000 or so. It's pretty neat, 100% unmolested, has all the original hardware on it.. it's pretty cool for a throwback laptop that's actually 'useable' per se.
As someone who does data recovery on very old devices, (such as older CNC controllers, SCADA devices of all kinds, and paper making equipment the size of warehouses) if the device boots with the drive in it, and that device can access that drive, the Laplink cables are removed from backpack, and I ask for a chair, because it may be a while. This solves compatibility issues, and also allows the transfer of troubleshooting programs to the machine as needed, as all of this old equipment is air-gapped. I know this may be overkill for your timeframe on stuff like this, but. the drives are so small, just run it while making dinner. I can get 12-15 kilobytes a second on a 286, and 386 on up with a faster port, easily 5-10 times that.
Google translate required
I wonder what can be done to fix the hinge. Maybe epoxy and screw a metal play with stand-offs to the bottom of the case?
I wonder if the LCD is similar to what’s in the SLT286 screens, the keyboard separating reminded me of that machine. I first thought it was that machine when I saw the thumbnail
14:03 Ha! I still have my TI-82 from middle and high school, and it still worked the last time I checked it.
Worked in a lab in an IT/data manager capacity and the ISA (even only 8 bit) slot would be ideal to interface computerized lab instruments at the time. I never worked in hospital, but I imagine it would work with computer control medicial devices in the same manner. The "lap-top" would work well with something that might have to roll from room to room, but that is further conjecture on my part.
Regarding your issues reading the Conner hard drive, many older IDE drives like that one not only don't support LBA, but also don't support querying the drive for its parameters (which is why you had to set the access mode to normal and set the CHS manually). Most USB IDE adapters don't support drives that can't do LBA and that can't report their CHS values, because there's no way to manually configure them. Those adapters just weren't designed to work with drives that old.
OH is "off hook", not "on hook". SI is likely the speed indicator light, lit for 1200 baud, unlit for 300 baud.
I'd love to own one of those old machines one day. The oldest I currently have is a Toshiba T8000, which is a 386 machine and, much to my surprise, still has the original battery which also still holds a charge. Talk about quality from the '90s. Because in the end, that is one of the downsides of all that miniaturization that we have seen since the start of the century. Longevity went down the drain.
For the hard drive access trouble, apparently there were several revisions of the IDE spec over the years, with the earliest form of it not having a way to auto-detect settings. The USB to IDE adapter depends on auto-config, so when connected it goes "???? no idea what this is" and resets itself repeatedly. The auto-config BIOS doesn't have a way to tell you it failed its auto-detection so it picks some random value that is wrong and just goes with it with no indication why it did that.
Thanks for the vid! It feels like this computer may have been connected to external scientific systems via some other card, and maybe that's why most of that software isn't working. I have one question though, why did you use xcopy for the hard drive backup? In my mind, the most logical thing would be to use dd on linux to just image the entire drive. The continuous linear read is easier on the heads (which could be in bad shape), and this would then let you explore the full space of the drive via that image, and you can take time to extract potentially erased files/software from empty space on that image etc. Personally, that has always been my route with specialized vintage computers...
I have to watch several times this part about XT-IDE configuration. I was struggling with this few days ago.
That one looks a bit similar to my first computer - a 386SX notebook by Sampo! Mine is a bit later model, made in June 1991 - I've bought it in 1993 for 399 USD. It is much smaller and simpler though - no ISA, no SIMM etc., practically not upgradeable at all. There is only a slot for optional 387 coprocessor and another one for some proprietary RAM expansion card I was never able to find. Sadly it gradually got broken after just a few years: the monitor started to lose image in 1998 (some problems with the internal flat cable maybe), then in about 2001 the hard drive stopped working (it is Conner as well, but a smaller one in size and with 20 MB), and a few years ago the power system broke (with some capacitors having popped out, I believe). Still hoping to repare it one day :)