Compaq Portable!

[chris]

I got a free Compaq Portable!

It was disassembled and didn't have any disks but it's reassembled and works now.

 

[Christopher]

Dude thats awesome!

 

[chris]

Still no OS disks so it just blinks and then after a huge amount of time says 1701 and tries to access the floppy drive(presumably meaning 'No OS found on disks')

Need to find a 5.25 floppy disk drive, other than my Apple II one. I've got a few computers that can use it and I know where to get one, but I have to wait for Monday...

 

[Phreakinus]

What can you do with it?

 

[funkytoad]

Thats an awesome machine!

 

[Metalchic]

Still no OS disks so it just blinks and then after a huge amount of time says 1701 and tries to access the floppy drive(presumably meaning 'No OS found on disks')
Need to find a 5.25 floppy disk drive, other than my Apple II one. I've got a few computers that can use it and I know where to get one, but I have to wait for Monday...

no portable 5.25" floppys, but i do have some regular PC 5.25inch floppy drives that fit in a slot in a comptuer where you could put a CDROM drive.

 

[Bunsen]

Which model?? Amber TFT flat panel or a CRT?

 

[chris]

This is the original.

9" green-screen CRT, dual 5.25 floppy drives, all slots filled with cards(one of them's a printer card, one's a tv-out card, one's a serial, the others are the defaults)

 

[chris]

OK, made some progress on it.

Apparently this is a PIMPED Compaq Portable...

It's got a 386(!) processor card, a presumably large amount of memory(wouldn't be surprised if it was 640k!) and, oddly, a hard drive card... minus the hard drive. That was what was causing the 1701 error, and when it's removed it displays "Diskette Error, please press any key to retry."

Sadly, it appears that the keyboard doesn't work, as even when I insert a (blank) diskette nothing happens when I press the keys. No access of the floppy drive or anything.

Anyone have any experience with these?

 

[Bunsen]

Woah, the original Portable! Historic, dude. Mine's the somewhat misnamed Portable III. Misnamed in that it's not all that portable, and has a 286.

It worked first pop out of the box with a downloaded driver disk imaged to floppy on a friend's PC, and loaded DOS 6.2.2 happily onto the internal HD. Now it plays startrek The LCD has a bit of streaking, but it's still highly readable.

Every now and then I take a sideways look at it with a Dremel in one hand and a widescreen LCD and P4 motherboard in the other....