The Engineer's Legacy: A Journey Through Time and Technology

In recent days, I found myself reminiscing about an old device that sparked my interest - the HP-85 portable computer from the 1970s. This handheld device was a marvel of engineering, designed by Jef Raskin and his team at Apple, and it's fascinating to see how far technology has come since then. The HP-85 was a compact, rugged device that could perform calculations, store data, and even had a built-in modem for communication.

One of the most interesting aspects of this device is its design philosophy. Jef Raskin believed that the mouse was a crutch that people would never get over, and he designed the HP-85 to be keyboard-only. This approach was revolutionary at the time, as it emphasized the importance of efficient typing and reduced the need for unnecessary gestures or clicks. The device's ergonomic design, with its snap-hinge and tactile feedback, made it a joy to use, especially for tasks that required precision and attention.

The HP-85 was also notable for its limited features and functionality compared to modern devices. It didn't have wireless connectivity, GPS, or even a color display - but what it lacked in terms of modern conveniences, it more than made up for in simplicity and reliability. The device's compact size and portability made it perfect for on-the-go data processing, and its keyboard-only design allowed users to focus on the task at hand.

As I delved deeper into my research, I stumbled upon another fascinating piece of technology - a handheld DOS device from HP. This device, while not as well-known as the HP-85, shares many similarities in terms of design and functionality. It was designed for ultra-portable computing, with features like a physical keyboard and a hinge that allowed it to be snapped open or closed.

I also discovered that this device had some interesting limitations. For example, it didn't have wireless connectivity, and its battery life was limited to around 4-6 hours of use. Despite these drawbacks, the device's design philosophy emphasized simplicity and efficiency - much like the HP-85.

One of the most striking aspects of this handheld DOS device is its user interface. The device features a physical keyboard with a serial port, and it uses a combination of keyboard-only commands and display text to convey information. This approach may seem clunky by modern standards, but it's actually quite elegant in its own right.

I also found that the device had some interesting quirks and limitations. For example, it didn't have a built-in dictionary or spell-checker - users would have to rely on external resources for grammar and spelling corrections. Additionally, the device's operating system was quite basic, with limited support for multi-user access and file sharing.

As I continued my research, I stumbled upon some interesting comments from viewers about my previous videos. One viewer mentioned that they found it fascinating to see devices like these being used in different contexts - whether it was server discussions, networking discussions, or even ultra-portable word processing. Another viewer asked me to explore more topics like this in the future.

In conclusion, the HP-85 and handheld DOS device are fascinating relics of a bygone era - a testament to the ingenuity and creativity of engineers and designers who pushed the boundaries of what was thought possible with technology. While they may seem clunky or outdated by modern standards, these devices have a certain charm that is hard to deny.

As I reflect on my journey through time and technology, I'm reminded of the importance of user experience and design philosophy. Devices like the HP-85 and handheld DOS device show us that sometimes, simplicity and efficiency can be just as powerful as innovation and features. Whether it's the tactile feedback of a physical keyboard or the ruggedness of a compact device, there's something to be said for devices that put the user at the center.

And so, I'll leave you with a thought - what if we went back in time and gave these engineers and designers some modern conveniences? Would they design differently? Would their creations be just as innovative and groundbreaking? The possibilities are endless, and it's up to us to explore and appreciate the designs of the past.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enevery when I'm back with Wendell from Louisville from level one text are you text in CC mail sending email damn Millennials we have some fun stuff to look at today you were here for a server build I'm not sure the order of any of the videos going up but we have a lot of cool content coming out from this trip of you coming out to visit us and these two so you've got a sharp device and an old HP okay and we should and we should talk about how these relate to your history with them and also why they're cool but these are actually I kind of want one of these before that this video is brought to you by the team group delta max SSD the delta max SSD has a mirror-like finish and addressable RGB LEDs to produce a large display area that's addressable by USB 2 or RGB cables the team delta max SSD is available in 250 gigabyte 500 gigabyte and one terabyte capacities capable of 560 megabyte per second read and 500 megabyte per second write speeds are about 90 ki of PS read and 80 K for write the Delta max SSD is compatible with ACS gigabyte asrock and msi RGB software for a quick synchronization with the rest of the system learn more at the link in the description below this is the first handheld computer ever this is from like 94 like 93 nice the world this is an HP 100 LX there's also the HP 200 LX which is even more popular but I was you know like the one hard alex was a pretty good deal the 200 LX added a pocket Quicken so you could do all your checkbook balancing this is a 640 by 240 CGA display what's the year 93 94 worse ok so it runs Doss it's an 801 86 handheld x86 handheld that runs for 40 hours 40 hours of screen on time from two double-a batteries this is peak technology from Intel and this how did you come across this device so I was doing like I had a summer job where I help fix electronic stuff or a junk store guy and he would buy these things by the tractor trailer and he was very kind and he was he was a very good employer but I was also maybe underage so it's a little bit of a quid pro quo and we got one of these on the thing and it was like are you gonna sell this in the jug store and he's like I was like I will work all summer for that and he's like deal yeah so this was this was transformative this thing changed my life basically I used it all the way through college I was great for physics so one of my lab projects in the physics was building a nuclear magnetic resonance sensor and so I hooked the lab equipment up to that through the serial port and just collected all the data directly on the computer it's got Lotus 1-2-3 yeah yeah actually here's the desktop I guess equivalent so yeah there's no obviously SIM card in this and there's no wireless so your phone books just a collection of numbers there's also like use of Lotus 1-2-3 so spreadsheet options CC mail let's let's go back over how that work CC mail so the infrared port or the serial port you would connect like say on your way to school and it would download all of your messages and then you could reply and when you connect back later it would put your replies actually out on the message board so in the days of email then email was not real-time it was you know once a day kind of thing yeah right you use this as a daily driver I did I carried it around with me everywhere I had a utility belt how long did you use it for until I got out of college okay cool so so this actually like my fourth one because I would just wear them out yeah so in terms of Technology yeah that's PCMCIA it it's only got RAM so 2 Meg's this tada 640k 640k oughta be enough for anybody so the other 1.3 meg is a ram disk where your data is stored alcohol but if you want to run real dose programs you need internal storage and all I could afford was 5 Megas megabytes of flash from 1994 yeah so what what was the what are the storage usage look like was it mostly just kind of spreadsheets and did a do word processing I guess yeah there's a limited word processor on there and you could run like WordPerfect would run but it was a little slow okay but my aren't perfect I haven't heard that mostly the the claim to fame here is that even though these are das programs it actually does multitasking really really well there's a there's a math program on here called derive I've managed to use up all the memory but there's a math program on here called derive which is kind of like Mathematica for daus and I use that because the school had a copy that meant I had a copy right and that was a lot of fun for for doing a lot of other other kinds of things oh yeah oh yeah not enough memory to have an application yeah so okay all the applications that have a square around them are running but oh okay got it so you could go over to life so we currently have world time running I guess yup and Lotus 1-2-3 and memo go and CC mail a lot of them actually let's go over let's go over this Lotus 1-2-3 Inc and quit it because most went to e3 was a hog it was a hog of a program so like there's Lotus 1-2-3 yeah it's a spreadsheet and no I don't want to save see you quit yes is the word processing program which would give you stuff I had a lot of fun with this technology I kept trying to replace it because it's like it's Doss and you know by the time I got to college it was like super antiquated and the software experience on here is still unrivaled like the software engineering team to put this together they really did an incredible job and so like this is one of the most viable devices that I had for replacing it so it's like it's a tiny you know clamshell and this is really 2000s this one yeah it's a two-in-one it's an import from Japan yeah and so I made a little bit of money importing these and configuring them for English and selling them to other people at my college it runs Linux it's really powerful it has Wi-Fi unlike you know is it accurate to call this a PDA or was that not terminology used yet I think that it is accurate to call it a PDA a lot of the software from Japan you know Japan's ahead of the curve everything and so we were you know we had like I think the Palm Pilot was just starting to to be a thing and then we had this which had a 640 by 480 display and it just all kinds of insanity the battery shot but if we if we plug it in you'll see a boot up in the Linux kernel and all the way are where these nickel cadmium or something I think it's my PO okay it might be nickel metal hydride be a blob Oh EAB 0:08 that's the thing just has a rechargeable battery yeah because lithium ion yeah okay cool so you get replacements for than if you wanted to pretty easily yeah it's a little it's a little slow that's so how did you how did you feel about this one versus your previous one I love that this one was Linux so it was really awesome and you were already using Linux at this time I guess yep but it was not like it was not daily driver material oh the toggle on the back has only Japanese characters on it so what's the what is that what does the toggle do just which there's no English on your Oh for battery changing okay so if the battery's low you could if you really quickly change the battery you don't have to reboot it I see so that's like a warning like hey what kind of mode are you in or something so as I understand it you used to mod these as well you said yeah you can overclock them but it requires Hardware modifications okay cool gonna lose a lot of that forty hour battery left though can we take it apart yeah is it what kind of screw is it yeah it's like super super super tiny torques so these literally had a cult following for many many years at long after they were obsolete oh man like people would like covet them and be crazy there are mods for RAM upgrades you can upgrade it all the way up to eight megabytes I think or sixteen megabytes internally I think some crazy people were even doing like doing like 32 Meg mods I only ever installed up to 8 meg bonds ok and then there was a crystal mod where you replaced a crystal but that literally made everything run faster so then you had to load a device driver to slow the system walk back down and stuff like that so it's a little there's a little messy I think that's just tape maybe like paper cuz it was a nice girl it was a pocket device yeah oh yeah right Pocket lint it's part of your receipt from 20 years ago if you were looking for that so for for these devices were there any even very simple games on them or now no you could run DOS games like crazy Oh perfect so I had a ton of DOS games on there but with only 5 megabytes to work work with yeah yeah yeah well and it's a black-and-white screen but das so it's a it's a 186 but without protected mode and then it's got a CR twenty thirty two battery inside and and that kind of thing so I just kind of know this is this parts not fun okay do you want a like a yeah buzzer yeah that'd be good you can't call it a spudger they'll yell at you oh is this what you're thinking of when you say spudger yeah cuz that is also what I thought of when I said spudger and there was a counter once and I not mad because he did correct me in a way that was accurate the counter was like Steve for like a year you've been calling this a spudger and you're Ron it's actually a Jimmy and I looked it up and that is called the Jimmy thank you so they're plastic clips yeah yeah and this plastic is so old it's super brittle yeah if we destroy this one it's probably okay but how hard is it to find have you ever looked on eBay yeah they they come up on eBay fairly regularly there was a there was a I still have an old bot that's configured to listen for these because there are some people that still use these like it's still a thing and there was some guy that was selling like six of them that had been modded oh wow it was like oh I need to buy it worked on one of them probably that's cool so so mods then you said you did like it was a oscillating crystal replacement I guess for one of them yeah that's easy the RAM mod was not easy okay what did the RAM mod involve is it soldered memory to the board did you have to desolder what was on there and then no there's like a stacking interface like a stacking card and so you'd have to solder some wires on and then you would stack the new memory on top of the old memory so we've got a very loud piezo electric speaker oh this is the one the reason I still have this one this will not send two energizer to repair but it's a battery leaked and I was like there's no way they're gonna be able to repair it and they did that actually did a good job repairing it how when was that was this still a pretty current device that was probably like 2005 oh wow so I got as as time passed a lot of the people that I had sold these to with mahse would come back for parts and so I ended up I wish that I'm not usually super nostalgic but then it's like years later it's like I wish I still had that yeah right but I got rid of pretty much everything but you can see there's a lot of really you know this is a sort of a marvel of engineering most of the space and the device actually goes through the expansion card and there's not really much else in here other than the motherboard and then this is the ribbon cable for the display okay it'll actually if you use nickel metal hydride batteries it'll actually charge from the 12 volt input okay cool where's where was your memory that you where would you do the memory mod oh so we got a little bit more teardown to do then is that what's the large chip the larger system-on-chip it's literally everything okay so that is a Intel I eat or a 2100 4 3 7 8 B 1992 so that is an 801 86 it's a 286 without protected mode okay so you couldn't run Windows on it but anything for 800 eighty six or eight o 88 would run great what got you into modding this I wanted it to go faster yeah okay so like most enthusiasts I guess was what was the battery trade-off like was it worth it yes okay it absolutely was worth it so I really think that uh like I look at modern machines like the I've been really tempted to order what's the one portable one that's like the clamshell it's a little bigger than this but it's a modern those touchscreen okay GPD did you people oh yeah yeah but I love this keyboard yeah and bored I think has never been replicated well I personally prefer like I don't I mean you can't do it anymore really but I used to favor phone smart phones I had a slide-out keyboard mm-hmm this is just the physical feedback of where the buttons are located meant fewer typos and easier to use but yeah that's that feels pretty nice so this one would be fairly complicated to mod because you've got that like this is a to megwin it so it's like one Meg on board and then another Meg and so you could replace this board with an 8 mega okay and you end up not it's like there's some weird rules like with 8 Meg's like the on board doesn't work and some other goofy stuff like that but you can see this is like really early pioneer stuff any particular reason for the bump profile here support that's that's where the mechanical buttons are for the keyboard Wow yeah I didn't think about that it's been yeah I'm still on like touchscreen what could that possibly be touch scan this like whatever they use for these mechanical buttons has almost the same profile as like the Apple keyboard and this feels better than the butterfly switches Wow not surprising so just two springs here for anything are just RF ground okay Tibet yeah stuff I think and OPA so actually now yeah but this is the piezo interface okay and then this is a North ground so is your shell that's pretty cool what is what's going on here is that the battery yeah okay so what your batteries yeah battery coils on both sides the reason they did that is g-forces in your pocket so like your throne with the fur on the device right and that's also what he just said g-force how much did end video pay you to advertise in this video it's how to device a few decades its Intel and they're real excited about their new I GP their new x86 processor perfectly capable for Winfred dos so what I guess one of my last questions maybe is a on this section anyway what games did you end up playing on it anything oh Zork rogue it's a net hack like I don't know it's been really there's a PC world on PC USA which are causal those worked really well on here Oregon Trail like legit not not not ironically playing Oregon Trail but like usually if I had yeah because the display CGA at 640 by 200 so it's a half a VGA resolution and like there are absolutely really good software mods for like making it work so awesome well so that's those two devices let's do a really quick thing on this the Canon cat so this was this is from Jef Raskin Canon made it but as Jef raskins a brainchild you might know him because he came up with the the Macintosh project but his vision of the Macintosh project wasn't the thing with the mouse that was stolen from park that Steve Jobs made it into it was something more like this and so this is kind of similar to these and that there's no mouse there's no anything else but it's a word processor but the software on here is really cool it's a really it is a good word processing experience like it n does it yeah it all works okay so this is another device where it's unassuming this is a commercial failure they made less than 20,000 of these but it's a nice sort of collector's piece because it's from Jef Raskin you know Macintosh Fame but also it sort of has his philosophy that's it's kind of a reminder that maybe the mouse isn't the best solution in terms of like productivity like the mouse is good for discovering a system but this is a great word processor and one of the things that it had like these leap buttons are really cool like say that you're working on a long manuscript and you remember like something that you talked about a couple paragraphs ago you can literally just hold the leap button and start typing the words you're searching for and if which button your you're searching for it will find it before or after the cursor right yes a modern control F yeah physically it was do you remember when you did that could you type a few words in a sentence or was it kind of one no you can talk as long as you held the button down type whatever you want and it's got a built in dictionary it's got a built-in modem and if you just start typing numbers it'll go into calculator mode so that you can do some calculations and you were telling me his philosophy what this stuff was that uh there was a concern for lost productivity with the mouse yeah and he's like I mean yeah his philosophy was that the mouse is a crutch that nobody ever gets over uh-huh so it's like look and he's not totally wrong either because if for example in even Windows you can learn how to efficiently use hotkeys like Windows eeeh to open up you know Explorer or windows D or all the other options it is significantly faster used keyboard only and I thought this was an interesting juxtaposition with like the handheld DOS device because this device from HP like the engineering team that did this really should be involved in modern phones and modern development because yeah it's such an elegant experience even though it's das like it's genuinely a better experience for you know maintaining like a phone book and doing portable work like ultra portable word processing and all of the kind of like data processing that you would do even though it doesn't have wireless and it doesn't have any of the modern conveniences it's actually quite a good experience from a user standpoint whereas most like phones and you know the notices are going crazy and it's just it's what Google wants you to experience not what you want yeah yeah the modern corporate experiences keep these are engaged constantly yeah as much as possible to the extent that there's even like the comments you'll see in the youtube comment sections that just say this is for the engagement which obviously we appreciate thank you yeah okay be challenged yeah but that is that is the goal of modern devices and there's a lot of distractions so this would be a pretty limiting because you're not on the Internet not if you could do Windows gaming on two double-a batteries oh yeah that'd be great great experience so this we're not gonna take apart it's a little more complicated but you said maybe one day you might do some restoration on this yeah it's had a rough life I've got a 3d print a thing for the floppy drive I haven't I haven't done that yet but I also don't use the floppy drive so the floppy drive will fail catastrophically eat the disc and permanently destroy the drive which is a non-standard Drive so was that a common failure yes okay so it's not like just this machine well it was a common failure after it was about 15 years old okay so I can't really I see I can't really fault them too much all right they only made 20,000 of them jef raskin always blamed canon for not marketing it properly they only sold them in a very brief window of I think about six months mm-hmm and then he moved on from Canon yeah and he'd moved on to Canon from Apple because of the disagreements with design philosophy yeah yeah yeah so that's some old devices I guess you've got more stuff on on your channel about all I mean there's server discussion there's networking discussion and then we have some stuff coming up on the epoch servers like I said I just had a blast talking about this crap because everybody the audience is like why is this I personally think it's super cool but like like I said I unfortunately don't really have time to use them but I find devices like the DS for example the I found the DS very I guess haptically nice to use because you've got like the hinge on the snap and all that and the physical feedback and this thing kind of falls in that same category and there's also like a handwritten BMC p6 in here so if you're watching person whoever assembled this beam looks it was handwritten by somebody probably here in the US this was probably not manufactured overseas right so hello person who did that that a serial number no MCP six or is it a initials I think it's somebody signature or like quality control line is checked by somebody you're saying I don't know well you did a good job BMC PA it's still here is to like leave your comment below I guess okay well that'll be it for this one and check out level one texts link below for more of not necessarily this kind of stuff but more cool stuff and yeah thanks for joining me again cute well thank you all next timeevery when I'm back with Wendell from Louisville from level one text are you text in CC mail sending email damn Millennials we have some fun stuff to look at today you were here for a server build I'm not sure the order of any of the videos going up but we have a lot of cool content coming out from this trip of you coming out to visit us and these two so you've got a sharp device and an old HP okay and we should and we should talk about how these relate to your history with them and also why they're cool but these are actually I kind of want one of these before that this video is brought to you by the team group delta max SSD the delta max SSD has a mirror-like finish and addressable RGB LEDs to produce a large display area that's addressable by USB 2 or RGB cables the team delta max SSD is available in 250 gigabyte 500 gigabyte and one terabyte capacities capable of 560 megabyte per second read and 500 megabyte per second write speeds are about 90 ki of PS read and 80 K for write the Delta max SSD is compatible with ACS gigabyte asrock and msi RGB software for a quick synchronization with the rest of the system learn more at the link in the description below this is the first handheld computer ever this is from like 94 like 93 nice the world this is an HP 100 LX there's also the HP 200 LX which is even more popular but I was you know like the one hard alex was a pretty good deal the 200 LX added a pocket Quicken so you could do all your checkbook balancing this is a 640 by 240 CGA display what's the year 93 94 worse ok so it runs Doss it's an 801 86 handheld x86 handheld that runs for 40 hours 40 hours of screen on time from two double-a batteries this is peak technology from Intel and this how did you come across this device so I was doing like I had a summer job where I help fix electronic stuff or a junk store guy and he would buy these things by the tractor trailer and he was very kind and he was he was a very good employer but I was also maybe underage so it's a little bit of a quid pro quo and we got one of these on the thing and it was like are you gonna sell this in the jug store and he's like I was like I will work all summer for that and he's like deal yeah so this was this was transformative this thing changed my life basically I used it all the way through college I was great for physics so one of my lab projects in the physics was building a nuclear magnetic resonance sensor and so I hooked the lab equipment up to that through the serial port and just collected all the data directly on the computer it's got Lotus 1-2-3 yeah yeah actually here's the desktop I guess equivalent so yeah there's no obviously SIM card in this and there's no wireless so your phone books just a collection of numbers there's also like use of Lotus 1-2-3 so spreadsheet options CC mail let's let's go back over how that work CC mail so the infrared port or the serial port you would connect like say on your way to school and it would download all of your messages and then you could reply and when you connect back later it would put your replies actually out on the message board so in the days of email then email was not real-time it was you know once a day kind of thing yeah right you use this as a daily driver I did I carried it around with me everywhere I had a utility belt how long did you use it for until I got out of college okay cool so so this actually like my fourth one because I would just wear them out yeah so in terms of Technology yeah that's PCMCIA it it's only got RAM so 2 Meg's this tada 640k 640k oughta be enough for anybody so the other 1.3 meg is a ram disk where your data is stored alcohol but if you want to run real dose programs you need internal storage and all I could afford was 5 Megas megabytes of flash from 1994 yeah so what what was the what are the storage usage look like was it mostly just kind of spreadsheets and did a do word processing I guess yeah there's a limited word processor on there and you could run like WordPerfect would run but it was a little slow okay but my aren't perfect I haven't heard that mostly the the claim to fame here is that even though these are das programs it actually does multitasking really really well there's a there's a math program on here called derive I've managed to use up all the memory but there's a math program on here called derive which is kind of like Mathematica for daus and I use that because the school had a copy that meant I had a copy right and that was a lot of fun for for doing a lot of other other kinds of things oh yeah oh yeah not enough memory to have an application yeah so okay all the applications that have a square around them are running but oh okay got it so you could go over to life so we currently have world time running I guess yup and Lotus 1-2-3 and memo go and CC mail a lot of them actually let's go over let's go over this Lotus 1-2-3 Inc and quit it because most went to e3 was a hog it was a hog of a program so like there's Lotus 1-2-3 yeah it's a spreadsheet and no I don't want to save see you quit yes is the word processing program which would give you stuff I had a lot of fun with this technology I kept trying to replace it because it's like it's Doss and you know by the time I got to college it was like super antiquated and the software experience on here is still unrivaled like the software engineering team to put this together they really did an incredible job and so like this is one of the most viable devices that I had for replacing it so it's like it's a tiny you know clamshell and this is really 2000s this one yeah it's a two-in-one it's an import from Japan yeah and so I made a little bit of money importing these and configuring them for English and selling them to other people at my college it runs Linux it's really powerful it has Wi-Fi unlike you know is it accurate to call this a PDA or was that not terminology used yet I think that it is accurate to call it a PDA a lot of the software from Japan you know Japan's ahead of the curve everything and so we were you know we had like I think the Palm Pilot was just starting to to be a thing and then we had this which had a 640 by 480 display and it just all kinds of insanity the battery shot but if we if we plug it in you'll see a boot up in the Linux kernel and all the way are where these nickel cadmium or something I think it's my PO okay it might be nickel metal hydride be a blob Oh EAB 0:08 that's the thing just has a rechargeable battery yeah because lithium ion yeah okay cool so you get replacements for than if you wanted to pretty easily yeah it's a little it's a little slow that's so how did you how did you feel about this one versus your previous one I love that this one was Linux so it was really awesome and you were already using Linux at this time I guess yep but it was not like it was not daily driver material oh the toggle on the back has only Japanese characters on it so what's the what is that what does the toggle do just which there's no English on your Oh for battery changing okay so if the battery's low you could if you really quickly change the battery you don't have to reboot it I see so that's like a warning like hey what kind of mode are you in or something so as I understand it you used to mod these as well you said yeah you can overclock them but it requires Hardware modifications okay cool gonna lose a lot of that forty hour battery left though can we take it apart yeah is it what kind of screw is it yeah it's like super super super tiny torques so these literally had a cult following for many many years at long after they were obsolete oh man like people would like covet them and be crazy there are mods for RAM upgrades you can upgrade it all the way up to eight megabytes I think or sixteen megabytes internally I think some crazy people were even doing like doing like 32 Meg mods I only ever installed up to 8 meg bonds ok and then there was a crystal mod where you replaced a crystal but that literally made everything run faster so then you had to load a device driver to slow the system walk back down and stuff like that so it's a little there's a little messy I think that's just tape maybe like paper cuz it was a nice girl it was a pocket device yeah oh yeah right Pocket lint it's part of your receipt from 20 years ago if you were looking for that so for for these devices were there any even very simple games on them or now no you could run DOS games like crazy Oh perfect so I had a ton of DOS games on there but with only 5 megabytes to work work with yeah yeah yeah well and it's a black-and-white screen but das so it's a it's a 186 but without protected mode and then it's got a CR twenty thirty two battery inside and and that kind of thing so I just kind of know this is this parts not fun okay do you want a like a yeah buzzer yeah that'd be good you can't call it a spudger they'll yell at you oh is this what you're thinking of when you say spudger yeah cuz that is also what I thought of when I said spudger and there was a counter once and I not mad because he did correct me in a way that was accurate the counter was like Steve for like a year you've been calling this a spudger and you're Ron it's actually a Jimmy and I looked it up and that is called the Jimmy thank you so they're plastic clips yeah yeah and this plastic is so old it's super brittle yeah if we destroy this one it's probably okay but how hard is it to find have you ever looked on eBay yeah they they come up on eBay fairly regularly there was a there was a I still have an old bot that's configured to listen for these because there are some people that still use these like it's still a thing and there was some guy that was selling like six of them that had been modded oh wow it was like oh I need to buy it worked on one of them probably that's cool so so mods then you said you did like it was a oscillating crystal replacement I guess for one of them yeah that's easy the RAM mod was not easy okay what did the RAM mod involve is it soldered memory to the board did you have to desolder what was on there and then no there's like a stacking interface like a stacking card and so you'd have to solder some wires on and then you would stack the new memory on top of the old memory so we've got a very loud piezo electric speaker oh this is the one the reason I still have this one this will not send two energizer to repair but it's a battery leaked and I was like there's no way they're gonna be able to repair it and they did that actually did a good job repairing it how when was that was this still a pretty current device that was probably like 2005 oh wow so I got as as time passed a lot of the people that I had sold these to with mahse would come back for parts and so I ended up I wish that I'm not usually super nostalgic but then it's like years later it's like I wish I still had that yeah right but I got rid of pretty much everything but you can see there's a lot of really you know this is a sort of a marvel of engineering most of the space and the device actually goes through the expansion card and there's not really much else in here other than the motherboard and then this is the ribbon cable for the display okay it'll actually if you use nickel metal hydride batteries it'll actually charge from the 12 volt input okay cool where's where was your memory that you where would you do the memory mod oh so we got a little bit more teardown to do then is that what's the large chip the larger system-on-chip it's literally everything okay so that is a Intel I eat or a 2100 4 3 7 8 B 1992 so that is an 801 86 it's a 286 without protected mode okay so you couldn't run Windows on it but anything for 800 eighty six or eight o 88 would run great what got you into modding this I wanted it to go faster yeah okay so like most enthusiasts I guess was what was the battery trade-off like was it worth it yes okay it absolutely was worth it so I really think that uh like I look at modern machines like the I've been really tempted to order what's the one portable one that's like the clamshell it's a little bigger than this but it's a modern those touchscreen okay GPD did you people oh yeah yeah but I love this keyboard yeah and bored I think has never been replicated well I personally prefer like I don't I mean you can't do it anymore really but I used to favor phone smart phones I had a slide-out keyboard mm-hmm this is just the physical feedback of where the buttons are located meant fewer typos and easier to use but yeah that's that feels pretty nice so this one would be fairly complicated to mod because you've got that like this is a to megwin it so it's like one Meg on board and then another Meg and so you could replace this board with an 8 mega okay and you end up not it's like there's some weird rules like with 8 Meg's like the on board doesn't work and some other goofy stuff like that but you can see this is like really early pioneer stuff any particular reason for the bump profile here support that's that's where the mechanical buttons are for the keyboard Wow yeah I didn't think about that it's been yeah I'm still on like touchscreen what could that possibly be touch scan this like whatever they use for these mechanical buttons has almost the same profile as like the Apple keyboard and this feels better than the butterfly switches Wow not surprising so just two springs here for anything are just RF ground okay Tibet yeah stuff I think and OPA so actually now yeah but this is the piezo interface okay and then this is a North ground so is your shell that's pretty cool what is what's going on here is that the battery yeah okay so what your batteries yeah battery coils on both sides the reason they did that is g-forces in your pocket so like your throne with the fur on the device right and that's also what he just said g-force how much did end video pay you to advertise in this video it's how to device a few decades its Intel and they're real excited about their new I GP their new x86 processor perfectly capable for Winfred dos so what I guess one of my last questions maybe is a on this section anyway what games did you end up playing on it anything oh Zork rogue it's a net hack like I don't know it's been really there's a PC world on PC USA which are causal those worked really well on here Oregon Trail like legit not not not ironically playing Oregon Trail but like usually if I had yeah because the display CGA at 640 by 200 so it's a half a VGA resolution and like there are absolutely really good software mods for like making it work so awesome well so that's those two devices let's do a really quick thing on this the Canon cat so this was this is from Jef Raskin Canon made it but as Jef raskins a brainchild you might know him because he came up with the the Macintosh project but his vision of the Macintosh project wasn't the thing with the mouse that was stolen from park that Steve Jobs made it into it was something more like this and so this is kind of similar to these and that there's no mouse there's no anything else but it's a word processor but the software on here is really cool it's a really it is a good word processing experience like it n does it yeah it all works okay so this is another device where it's unassuming this is a commercial failure they made less than 20,000 of these but it's a nice sort of collector's piece because it's from Jef Raskin you know Macintosh Fame but also it sort of has his philosophy that's it's kind of a reminder that maybe the mouse isn't the best solution in terms of like productivity like the mouse is good for discovering a system but this is a great word processor and one of the things that it had like these leap buttons are really cool like say that you're working on a long manuscript and you remember like something that you talked about a couple paragraphs ago you can literally just hold the leap button and start typing the words you're searching for and if which button your you're searching for it will find it before or after the cursor right yes a modern control F yeah physically it was do you remember when you did that could you type a few words in a sentence or was it kind of one no you can talk as long as you held the button down type whatever you want and it's got a built in dictionary it's got a built-in modem and if you just start typing numbers it'll go into calculator mode so that you can do some calculations and you were telling me his philosophy what this stuff was that uh there was a concern for lost productivity with the mouse yeah and he's like I mean yeah his philosophy was that the mouse is a crutch that nobody ever gets over uh-huh so it's like look and he's not totally wrong either because if for example in even Windows you can learn how to efficiently use hotkeys like Windows eeeh to open up you know Explorer or windows D or all the other options it is significantly faster used keyboard only and I thought this was an interesting juxtaposition with like the handheld DOS device because this device from HP like the engineering team that did this really should be involved in modern phones and modern development because yeah it's such an elegant experience even though it's das like it's genuinely a better experience for you know maintaining like a phone book and doing portable work like ultra portable word processing and all of the kind of like data processing that you would do even though it doesn't have wireless and it doesn't have any of the modern conveniences it's actually quite a good experience from a user standpoint whereas most like phones and you know the notices are going crazy and it's just it's what Google wants you to experience not what you want yeah yeah the modern corporate experiences keep these are engaged constantly yeah as much as possible to the extent that there's even like the comments you'll see in the youtube comment sections that just say this is for the engagement which obviously we appreciate thank you yeah okay be challenged yeah but that is that is the goal of modern devices and there's a lot of distractions so this would be a pretty limiting because you're not on the Internet not if you could do Windows gaming on two double-a batteries oh yeah that'd be great great experience so this we're not gonna take apart it's a little more complicated but you said maybe one day you might do some restoration on this yeah it's had a rough life I've got a 3d print a thing for the floppy drive I haven't I haven't done that yet but I also don't use the floppy drive so the floppy drive will fail catastrophically eat the disc and permanently destroy the drive which is a non-standard Drive so was that a common failure yes okay so it's not like just this machine well it was a common failure after it was about 15 years old okay so I can't really I see I can't really fault them too much all right they only made 20,000 of them jef raskin always blamed canon for not marketing it properly they only sold them in a very brief window of I think about six months mm-hmm and then he moved on from Canon yeah and he'd moved on to Canon from Apple because of the disagreements with design philosophy yeah yeah yeah so that's some old devices I guess you've got more stuff on on your channel about all I mean there's server discussion there's networking discussion and then we have some stuff coming up on the epoch servers like I said I just had a blast talking about this crap because everybody the audience is like why is this I personally think it's super cool but like like I said I unfortunately don't really have time to use them but I find devices like the DS for example the I found the DS very I guess haptically nice to use because you've got like the hinge on the snap and all that and the physical feedback and this thing kind of falls in that same category and there's also like a handwritten BMC p6 in here so if you're watching person whoever assembled this beam looks it was handwritten by somebody probably here in the US this was probably not manufactured overseas right so hello person who did that that a serial number no MCP six or is it a initials I think it's somebody signature or like quality control line is checked by somebody you're saying I don't know well you did a good job BMC PA it's still here is to like leave your comment below I guess okay well that'll be it for this one and check out level one texts link below for more of not necessarily this kind of stuff but more cool stuff and yeah thanks for joining me again cute well thank you all next time\n"