Gets my vote. Mine is an original model w/o the backlight. Have one 1" line of pixels bad after all this time, but once your visual filters are tuned to it, it's not noticable. Good job! Paul Braun NerdWare -- The History of the PC and the Nerds who brought it to you. nerdware(a)laidbak.com www.laidbak.com/nerdware

That really should be split into two different categories, since plasma and lcd's are two completely different animals. I've got a Compaq Portable III with a nifty plasma display, along with a GRiD 386 tank that has one as well. But, for LCD's, the Mac would be hard to beat. The screen on my GRiD 2270 is nice, but not as crisp as the Mac's. Paul Braun NerdWare -- The History of the PC and the Nerds who brought it to you. nerdware(a)laidbak.com www.laidbak.com/nerdware

The Kaypro 2000 was pretty bad. It was squished (IIRC, about a third the hieght it should have been), and you had to be sitting in just the right spot to see it. I played Games and messed with CAD on it. I remember playing the first Battletech game ("the Cresent Hawks Inception", a sort of RPG) on it, I had to play on a friends systems for an hour or so at one point becuase I literally couldn't see one of the destinations when playing on the Kaypro! Zane | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Adminstrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | Linux Enthusiast | | healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

On Sat, 8 Apr 2000, Derek Peschel wrote: No, the 2000 was an MS-DOS laptop circa 1985 (way back when "2000" meant "the future"). It had a cool looking aluminum case (sort of the Chevy Vega of portables). The Osborne's 5" display was *much* more readable than the early large LCD's. But if you want a cool luggable, go back 10 years before the Osborne: the 1972 HP 9830 with dot-matrix LED display. BTW, Derek, did you ever get your GRiDPad to work? -- Doug

Doug wrote: It had a *very* nice, a good keyboard, and a four hour battery. But the screen sucked, and in only had a 720k floppy. However, mine was a luggable as I eventually had the docking station with a 5.25" 360k floppy and huge 30MB HD :^) The interesting thing about that 30MB HD was that it was huge. When I replaced it with a Twinhead 386sx/16 in 1990 I thought the 40MB HD would be equally huge, but I almost immediatly filled it (something to do with being able to suddenly run a lot of stuff that wouldn't have run/been usable on the Kaypro). The Twinhead screen isn't bad, though it has a ghosting problem, and systems battery was never good for anything other than an UPS. I've still got the Twinhead, but unfortunatly got rid of the Kaypro in '93. Zane | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Adminstrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | Linux Enthusiast | | healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

On Sat, 8 Apr 2000, Rich Lafferty wrote: Yeah, baby! I remember somebody demo'ing the T5100 running Unix in the late 1980's (prob 1989). I think a NeXT cube was being demo'd at the same meeting. I don't think I've ever had a worse case of hardware envy than I had that day :-) I think Interactive Systems ported Unix to the T5100, so if you can find an old 386 version, it probably has the drivers. Let me know if you get it working. I think I have both a T5100 and a box of Interactive Unix in storage someplace. Hope you got the monitor cable. Damn hard to find by itself. -- Doug

Hi, Heard of few getting into theirs to hook into a new battery when the old battery expired. Drilled short depth in 3 places hoping to find cavity within and didn't find it. It is completely filled with epoxy to the brim. How did one manage to expose theirs to get at the battery itself? I have more and more coming of machines equipped with dallas and it's clones. In fact, I have seen few go dead on pentium boards also. Be thankful that now that most newer boards are using coin lithium battery but still, there are useful machines out there with that solid block of IC and dead battery, quartz in potted containers. Wizard

That's exactly what my friend did - ground away *carefully* with a dremel until it was exposed. Jeff (Technoid) on this list mentioned in the Sun NVRAM thread that he'd done this successfully...maybe he's got some practical advice for you. Cheers, Aaron On Sat, 8 Apr 2000, Tony Duell wrote:

Depends on the make how to remake the clock batt. The SG Thompson chip I retrofitted a batt onto had the leads on the right side of the chip and they were easily exposed with a knife. The dallas chips are constructed a bit differently with no gap between the sram on the bottom and the batt/oscillator in the epoxy 'brick' on top. The dallas chips are often 'missing' a few pins. Those pins are likely bent upward and are the leads for power, ground and oscillator connections. The dremel drill will likely clear a path but you are going to have to take each model chip and learn how it is constructed to fix it. It is perfectly ok to use a 'clone' batt to power the sram. I used a 4.5volt batt I scrounged from a 286 to power the sg thompson chip while I waited for the Dallas to arrive. Still, it is far easier to just replace the thing. I had to hang a batt on the old one because it was very difficult to find the correct replacement part. I hear they won't really be in the channel til next year! I got mine straight from Dallas and they had nearly none. I might have gotten thier last DS1642! -- ----------------------------------------------------------- Jeffrey S. Worley Technical Services Bits & Bytes Computer Services Inc. 1979B Hendersonville Road Asheville, NC 28803 828-684-8953 - voice 0900-1700 five days 828-687-9284 - 24hr fax Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk? Technoid(a)Cheta.net -----------------------------------------------------------

Technoid(a)cheta.net wrote: Hi I was thinking, one might take it to their local pc board assembly house. Most of these places have low power xray machines that they use to look at solder joints on ball grid parts. A couple of snap shots at a couple of angles would show how the battery is placed and where the wires are. If you had a friend at the airport, that would be another option. Many court houses also have xray machines now days as well. Just a thought Dwight

Dallas used to make a "smart socket" which IIRC was a battery backed device without the device. Perhaps you could look into that and then contemplate whether you'd like to put yout device into that socket. That migh tactually have possibilities. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: Dwight Elvey <elvey(a)hal.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Monday, April 10, 2000 7:32 PM Subject: Re[2]: Dallas module battery replacement... I

Russ Blakeman <rhblake(a)bigfoot.com> wrote: Hi Since the silicon for the smaller RAMs are not being made anymore, you can only get some of the newer, larger sizes. Other than some old shelf stock, the original ones are getting rare. An adapter socket solves this but hacking open an epoxy module can be a fun thing to do. One does need to attack with care. Cutting open a lithium battery that may still have some un-reacted lithium can be a finger burning experience. Have a glass of vegetable oil handy. If you do cut into it and it lights off, dropping it into the oil would be better than the couch. Don't drop it in water, this can be explosive. Dwight