On 07/28/2010 03:40 AM, Adrian Burgess wrote:
Admission : I have an EO 440... and I've still not
got it working, it
came with batteries (long exhausted, obviously), and I don't have a PSU.
You can easily replace the batteries in that with standard NiCAD C cells
(I think). I suppose in a pinch you could just replace it with regular
alkaline C cells just to get it to power on - but obviously NEVER try to
plug in a charger. The battery pack is just a heat sensor + all of the
C cells wired together in series held together by shrinkwrapped plastic.
Not sure about the power supply (don't have it infront of me, but if I
remember, I can lookup the specs when I get home.)
The Eo 880 has completely different sized NiCAD batteries, I'm not sure
you can easily make replacements. Might be A or B cells.
The 880 has a scsi port and a completely different internal hard drive -
not sure what kind either are, but they don't look like anything standard.
The 440 and 880 aren't that different otherwise, the 880's slightly
faster and might have a larger hard disk, plus the scsi port. I vaguely
remember them having a floppy port, but not sure which machine (or maybe
both) had it. They also might have had parallel ports.
My 880 came with a dead ROM, but I was able to get it to work using the
ROM board from a 440 - I hope there's no extras on the 880 ROM card.
The ROM card looks sort of like a PCMCIA card, but with a different
connector. The dead ROM looked like it had a manufacturing defect, as
if there was extra paint that prevented the soldering from working.
They were awesome machines, and the Penpoint OS was quite nifty. Looked
like a tabbed notebook, with each tab being a different application. I
recall there was a tab UI for Windows 3.1 that resembled it.
Penpoint's HWR sucked when compared to even an original Newton - you had
to write each letter in a specific box, and even that didn't work
right. Of course Newton Intelligence 2.0's HWR killed everything else's
hand writing recognition, too bad the ipad doesn't use that. Rumor has
it it's still (or was?) part of OS X, but I've no idea how to enable it,
or use it.
There was a copy of PenPoint for a specific black and white IBM Thinkpad
(TP730?) which had an intel 386SX chip that ran at a faster clock rate,
but was of course much slower than the Eo's Hobbit CPU. That Thinkpad
could run a Pen version of Windows 95 as well. The magnetic pen from
this machine could work on an Eo, but had a button that acted as the
right click mouse button. I think there was some issue with the
sensitivity of this pen when used with Eo's - if you got too close to
the Eo's screen it would misread the location. Both sets of machines
used a magnetic digitizer, so a regular stylus wouldn't work. If you
don't have that specific pen, or one similar to it, your Eo is going to
be unusable. Maybe some early Wacom (or other) tablets use this, not sure.
The Hobbit CPU is an interesting beast. Not quite CISC, not quite RISC,
they called it a CRISP processor I think. It's actually a stack based
CPU that uses the stack (and of course the cache) instead of registers.
Beautiful assembly on this beast... The only other machine that uses it
AFIK was the original pre-release BeBox. This was originally designed
to be friendly to C and C++, but of course Apple went with ARM instead
for the Newts...
If you had the cellular module you'd know it. It adds quite a lot of
extra plastic to the bottom and has a desk phone handset on top. It's
completely worthless now - at least in the US as analog cell service has
been shut off. see:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/188228/atandt_eo_440_personal_communicator_1…
AT&T even had a data service for it (beyond the fax application) that
was based on the uucp commands. Was probably just email. Not sure.
If you do manage to power it up, see if there's any interesting software
on the hard drive (if it has one). I think there was a spreadsheet and
some other office software for it.