9 Apr
1998
9 Apr
'98
12:53 p.m.
Today I bought three portable PCs marked "Rabbit 286". They're about
the size of a large lunch box and have a keyboard that fastens against one
side. When you remove the keyboard it uncovers a gas plasma screen. There
are slots for two 3.5 drives on the right hand side and a door on the left
side. Opening the door exposes the back of several expansion card slots.
There's a label on the bottom that says "Chicony Electronics Co.",
"Model
286G-A", "Gas Plasma Display" and "640H x 400W Dots". One almost
works, one
is dead and the third one is somewhere in between. Does anyone know
anything about these? I'm wondering if it's possible to put a small 386 or
486 mother board in these.
Joe
9 Apr
9 Apr
1:28 p.m.
Today I bought three portable PCs marked
"Rabbit 286". They're about
the size of a large lunch box and have a keyboard that fastens against one
side. When you remove the keyboard it uncovers a gas plasma screen. There
are slots for two 3.5 drives on the right hand side and a door on the left
side. Opening the door exposes the back of several expansion card slots.
There's a label on the bottom that says "Chicony Electronics Co.",
"Model
286G-A", "Gas Plasma Display" and "640H x 400W Dots". One almost
works, one
is dead and the third one is somewhere in between. Does anyone know
anything about these? I'm wondering if it's possible to put a small 386 or
486 mother board in these.
Intersting... Well, you probably can put a newer board
in, but it
depends... What you have to do is take the entire thing apart and see what
it has right now, it may be an odd shape... Since you have three of them, I
would say fix up one of them to the normal 286 config, and then use the
other two to make one or two upgraded versions, depending on what's wrong
with them. Sounds like fun...
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3:07 p.m.
At 04:53 PM 4/9/98, you wrote:
Today I bought three portable PCs marked
"Rabbit 286". They're about
the size of a large lunch box and have a keyboard that fastens against one
side. When you remove the keyboard it uncovers a gas plasma screen. There
[snip]
Joe
I don't know if it's realistic to expect any help from them (I'm
pessimistic after dealing with IBM since 1984), but Chicony have a web site:
http://www.chicony.com/
Their keyboards were popular for a while, I haven't heard much about them
lately. Looks like they're into notebooks these days.
--
David Wollmann |
dwollmann(a)ibmhelp.com | Support for legacy IBM products.
DST ibmhelp.com Technical Support | Data, document and file conversion for IBM
http://www.ibmhelp.com/ | legacy file and media formats.
10 Apr
10 Apr
4:43 p.m.
I've wanted to find one of those and do that too.
640 x 400 is probably line-doubled CGA (which is 320 x 200 and 640 x 200 in
mono mode) or maybe EGA (not sure what res, I never had one of those). But
it's probably red monochrome right?
You could open it up and look at the interface to the display; if it's
integrated into the motherboard, you're probably SOL, but maybe you're lucky
and it's on an ISA card (not likely since they probably wanted to conserve
slots as much as possible). Then again it could just directly use the CGA/EGA
signals rather than something proprietary, but that would have been harder to
do I'd think.
You could get one of those cheesy upgrade options :-). There used to be 386
ISA cards, and there might still be those "Make It 386" or "-486"
cards that
replace the processor. I saw them as recently as a year or so ago in some
catalog I think.
Joe wrote:
Today I bought three portable PCs marked "Rabbit 286". They're about
the size of a large lunch box and have a keyboard that fastens against one
side. When you remove the keyboard it uncovers a gas plasma screen. There
are slots for two 3.5 drives on the right hand side and a door on the left
side. Opening the door exposes the back of several expansion card slots.
There's a label on the bottom that says "Chicony Electronics Co.",
"Model
286G-A", "Gas Plasma Display" and "640H x 400W Dots". One almost
works, one
is dead and the third one is somewhere in between. Does anyone know
anything about these? I'm wondering if it's possible to put a small 386 or
486 mother board in these.
--
_______ KB7PWD @ KC7Y.AZ.US.NOAM ecloud(a)bigfoot.com
(_ | |_) Shawn T. Rutledge http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud
__) | | \_____________________________________________________________
6:26 p.m.
Shawn,
I opened a couple of them up last night and played with them. One is now
fully functional and I *think* the display is history in the other one. I
haven't checked the third one yet.
At 06:43 PM 4/10/98 -0700, you wrote:
I've wanted to find one of those and do that too.
640 x 400 is probably line-doubled CGA (which is 320 x 200 and 640 x 200 in
mono mode) or maybe EGA (not sure what res, I never had one of those). But
it's probably red monochrome right?
It is EGA and it is red monochrome. Nice and bright!
You could open it up and look at the interface to the display; if it's
integrated into the motherboard, you're probably SOL, but maybe you're lucky
and it's on an ISA card (not likely since they probably wanted to conserve
It's strange, it has what appears to be a Western Digital controller
card for the floppy and hard drive except the plasma display is also driven
off the same card! There is also a second card in the machine that has a
port for an external monitor. The motherboard appers to be a standard size
and layout board. If it is, I'll probably stick a 386 or 486 motheboard in
one of these machines.
Joe
slots as much as possible). Then again it could just
directly use the
CGA/EGA
signals rather than something proprietary, but that
would have been harder to
do I'd think.
You could get one of those cheesy upgrade options :-). There used to be 386
ISA cards, and there might still be those "Make It 386" or "-486"
cards that
replace the processor. I saw them as recently as a year or so ago in some
catalog I think.
Joe wrote:
Today I bought three portable PCs marked "Rabbit 286". They're about
the size of a large lunch box and have a keyboard that fastens against one
side. When you remove the keyboard it uncovers a gas plasma screen. There
are slots for two 3.5 drives on the right hand side and a door on the left
side. Opening the door exposes the back of several expansion card slots.
There's a label on the bottom that says "Chicony Electronics Co.",
"Model
286G-A", "Gas Plasma Display" and "640H x 400W Dots". One almost
works, one
is dead and the third one is somewhere in between. Does anyone know
anything about these? I'm wondering if it's possible to put a small 386 or
486 mother board in these.
--
_______ KB7PWD @ KC7Y.AZ.US.NOAM ecloud(a)bigfoot.com
(_ | |_) Shawn T. Rutledge http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud
__) | | \_____________________________________________________________
9606
days inactive
9607
days old
4 comments
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