Re: Zel's Fleet Blog...Jag, Citroen, Mercedes, Sinclair & AC Model 70
Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2020 6:08 pm
Here's one of our periodic wanders off into the world of obsolete technology which happen now and then around me...
Hello there...
We've got yet another system to join the vintage Toshiba portable computer family.
Well...sort of.
I used to have one of these back around 2000 which I used for a lot of my school work. It sadly failed at one point due to capacitor issues on the power supply board (which these machines almost all suffer from at some point, likewise on the display backlight inverter board). It was stripped down with a view to being repaired however due to a communications breakdown (read: my father ignoring everything he was told) when we were clearing out the loft several key parts ended up getting binned.
These machines seem to change hands for alarmingly large sums of money in good order these days, so when this one popped up for £50 I grabbed it. Especially as it has the optional hard disk, most T1200s had dual (720K) floppy drives.
This is important as apparently the non HD equipped machines lack several other bits, so you can't just slot the drive in. I'm hoping that once I make one good one out of the two (my original has a largely un-yellowed and almost unmarked case for a start) that I'll be able to recover some documents off my old one's drive. The 20Mb drive uses a proprietary JVC/Ricoh interface so there's no real way to get data to/from it without one of these laptops (or a handful of other, even rarer machines). Not the last time Toshiba played this card...the original T3200 uses a 40Mb drive with a similarly oddball proprietary interface, made by Fujitsu in that case.
I will definitely be swapping the keyboard for mine...that is just nasty...
Though a trip through the dishwasher for the keycaps would probably make the world of difference.
Unsurprisingly this one doesn't work...just showing an amber light on the power supply. So at the very least that will need to be recapped. Hopefully that will be enough to get it going...time will tell.
Be a nice little productivity machine if I can get it working reliably. It's based around an 80C86 processor (a low power CMOS based version of the 8086), has 640+384K of memory to work with and importantly over the other machines of this era I have, backs these specs up with a hard disk and a screen with a decent backlight. The lack of that is by far the biggest blot on the Amstrad PPC512's copybook.
My original one was still running the original battery which was ancient even when I was using it, yet that with a bit if careful power management (you can manually power down the hard drive and drop the clock speed (down from 9.5 to 4.5MHz if I remember right) it used to get me through a full secondary school day and the 45 minute bus ride to/from the place without breaking a sweat.
... I've never had a modern laptop which could do that! Never mind one from the mid 80s.
What do you bet that a clean, working example now turns up locally at a reasonable price?
Hello there...
We've got yet another system to join the vintage Toshiba portable computer family.
Well...sort of.
I used to have one of these back around 2000 which I used for a lot of my school work. It sadly failed at one point due to capacitor issues on the power supply board (which these machines almost all suffer from at some point, likewise on the display backlight inverter board). It was stripped down with a view to being repaired however due to a communications breakdown (read: my father ignoring everything he was told) when we were clearing out the loft several key parts ended up getting binned.
These machines seem to change hands for alarmingly large sums of money in good order these days, so when this one popped up for £50 I grabbed it. Especially as it has the optional hard disk, most T1200s had dual (720K) floppy drives.
This is important as apparently the non HD equipped machines lack several other bits, so you can't just slot the drive in. I'm hoping that once I make one good one out of the two (my original has a largely un-yellowed and almost unmarked case for a start) that I'll be able to recover some documents off my old one's drive. The 20Mb drive uses a proprietary JVC/Ricoh interface so there's no real way to get data to/from it without one of these laptops (or a handful of other, even rarer machines). Not the last time Toshiba played this card...the original T3200 uses a 40Mb drive with a similarly oddball proprietary interface, made by Fujitsu in that case.
I will definitely be swapping the keyboard for mine...that is just nasty...
Though a trip through the dishwasher for the keycaps would probably make the world of difference.
Unsurprisingly this one doesn't work...just showing an amber light on the power supply. So at the very least that will need to be recapped. Hopefully that will be enough to get it going...time will tell.
Be a nice little productivity machine if I can get it working reliably. It's based around an 80C86 processor (a low power CMOS based version of the 8086), has 640+384K of memory to work with and importantly over the other machines of this era I have, backs these specs up with a hard disk and a screen with a decent backlight. The lack of that is by far the biggest blot on the Amstrad PPC512's copybook.
My original one was still running the original battery which was ancient even when I was using it, yet that with a bit if careful power management (you can manually power down the hard drive and drop the clock speed (down from 9.5 to 4.5MHz if I remember right) it used to get me through a full secondary school day and the 45 minute bus ride to/from the place without breaking a sweat.
... I've never had a modern laptop which could do that! Never mind one from the mid 80s.
What do you bet that a clean, working example now turns up locally at a reasonable price?