Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

I was really, really bored at work, so decided to look at the "286 and older" section of a local auction/ad site. Most of the stuff was crap - Pentium III boxes filed in the wrong category, vaguely old looking monitors, etc. But then I found "it"; it had been advertised for sale for well over two years, and the ad was still there. Three mails and two days later I was a silly bit of cash lighter and a strange thing richer.

Ladies & gentlemen, may I present to you: the Kanto Denshi Corporation Mugen Turbo portable computer


It is in fact very portable! I can lug it around without dislocating my shoulder. Not too bad.


Push, eh... well, why not.



Ta-dah! Behold the glory of a midget XT keyboard coupled with a single 5.25" floppy drive and a cute little CRT




The back side also had a handy sliding cover, and a hollow section to store the thick 230V cord in. Has serial, parallel, and what turned out to be a CGA card. I was hoping it would have been a Token Ring card, but alas.



640K RAM and IBM PC-DOS 3.20 seems to indicate it's a 8086, and somewhere 1986-ish.


Holy cow. It has a HDD - the full whopping 20MB! And besides Framework III, Lotus, dbase and a load more that I still need to investigate... C:\GAMES.

I had never heard of Kanto Denshi before; they still exist though! Seeing their corporate website it's not entirely surprising the name didn't ring a bell - 20 employees currently. They seem to be into industrial machinery and automation nowadays. I have not been able to find anything on this machine, full stop. That alone was reason enough to buy it.

But, seriously, has anyone ever heard of this machine? Got an idea where to find more information? I sent a mail to Kanto Denshi directly, but apart from an automated "thank you for mailing us" reply (in kanji, no less) it's been awfully quiet. The seller couldn't tell me much more than that the machine was used by financial auditors at a big local firm - there's oodles of traces of financial reports, tax dossiers, etc, etc, on the HDD. Gives you an idea how picky security was back then - nowadays (at least!) the HDD would have been crushed.

Anyway, not all is well though; the F7 key is broken. A bit of plastic was broken off. The broken-off bit was in the keyboard though, so maybe there's still hope. Or maybe this is a bog standard XT keyboard component and it can be fixed without a hassle - any advice is welcome.



Next to that, the "W" key also doesn't do much, although there is no visible breakage there. I've resisted the temptation to try to find out what's wrong with it, because the odds are high that I'd just make it worse.

Next up: installing the Ubuntu bootloader and kernel on it, net-loading the rest of the system over SLIP, making it run Unity and Firefox 34 and bitch my head off saying "modern software is shit because it doesn't run as fast on this as it does on my i7 laptop".

Nice! Looks like a tower version of an Osborne. Must have been one of the final CRT ones overall. I have a Toshiba T1000 kicking around somewhere from 1987. That's an 8088, but does have an LCD screen and a more conventional clamshell design.

Very nice! Reminds me of my Compaq Portable II. Although yours seems to have 6 ISA slots (maybe 7, depending on how that parallel port is implemented), and the Portable II only has 4.

Those old keyboards are sometimes very interesting, many of them are capacitive. So in an odd reversal, they are like little multitouch screens hidden under the caps and buckling springs.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the CGA cards in some of these types of machines also had lightpen ports. So if you can find an old lightpen (I am kicking myself for missing 2/$7 on ebay recently) you can experiment with how well that works. Unfortunately the green screens had long persistence and that makes them less accurate. The composite output on the CGA card is also required for some old software to support color, using artifact colors; things like King's Quest et cetera. That was the only way for the PC to display 16 color graphics at the time.

That's a really nice, sharp monochrome display, too.

Is that Leisure Suit Larry I spy on the hard drive?

I've got DOS 2.2 on Verbatim 5.25 inch floppies circa 1984, last time I tried to boot them they still worked, but that was a few years ago...

Thats a seriously cool machine! I think you have to pop it open for us. That will tell you what CPU you have, I bet 286.

And, oooooh Larry. That game tought me english .. Nothing like sex to motivate a young boy

vishnu wrote: Is that Leisure Suit Larry I spy on the hard drive?

It appears to be the odd thing is that it launches and the music starts playing, but nothing ever shows up on the monitor. Might be that it needs that CGA card hooked up to a monitor.

The "PITSTOP.EXE" doesn't do much at all either - it launches, attempts to access the A: drive, then exits back to prompt. Guess it needs something on a floppy that I don't have.

Alver wrote: The "PITSTOP.EXE" doesn't do much at all either - it launches, attempts to access the A: drive, then exits back to prompt. Guess it needs something on a floppy that I don't have.

I played that game in my first year in university That's probably the copy protection, it needs that floppy and if you wanted to make a copy you needed a special disk duplicator program.

It's probably a 8086. If you're really (un)lucky it might not be 100% IBM compatible.

jan-jaap wrote: I played that game in my first year in university That's probably the copy protection, it needs that floppy and if you wanted to make a copy you needed a special disk duplicator program.

Bummer I got a bunch of floppies with it, but none related to the pitstop.exe... guess it was lost somewhere in the last two decades. Luckily, I have plenty of other games from my other 8086.

Any progress?
I found a site that has pictures of the internals of many types of keyboards: http://deskthority.net
Once you know what the switch type is called (look at the stem shape on the key cap too) it will be much easier to source a replacement.
I 'd also feel better knowing that there isn't a corroding "CMOS" battery inside.

the VDU looks like the one I am building here, impressed