Hi everybody!

[XS-Nitrogen]

Hi,

I've only recently started collecting old computers. Truth be told, I only have two that could be considered worthy of collecting. One is a DEC AlphaServer 1200. The other one, and the computer in particular that brings me here, is an old Compaq Portable I bought a couple of months ago. I look forward to being able to get the old suitcase working, but it's a lot older than anything I've worked on before, and I'm at a loss as to where to go with it.

Problem One. Half of the keys on my keyboard don't work - They all worked when I got it, but after half an hour of playing around in DOS, I noticed they were dying one by one. Taking apart the keyboard, it looks like the contacts on the keys in question don't touch the circuitry anymore. It looks to me like they're mounted on little foam sponge-type things, and these are getting compressed so that when you push the key down, they don't touch the board. Seeing as how everything is self-contained, I can't exactly swap out the keyboard with one of my other ones, and even if I did, it wouldn't attach to the front/bottom of the case anymore.

Problem Two. Getting data to and from the computer. I don't have anything with a 360k floppy drive or disks to go with it. It appears to have a 20mb hard drive, which is how it boots - It came with PC-DOS 3.1 installed on it. I tried attaching a 1.2mb 5.25" drive instead of the 360k, but that didn't work out. Same story with a 1.44mb 3.5" drive. I do have some old drive controller cards, but I don't have any DOS driver disks for them, so I don't know how well that would go. I could do serial cable transfer, but I'd have to somehow get some software onto the Portable to do this, would I not?

The idea outcome would be to hook it up to a Linux machine with a serial cable and use it as a terminal. From there, I could use it as a command line word processor if I wanted to. As it's actually driving the Linux machine, it defeats the problem of data transfer, too. Not very practical, as I can just SSH from my laptop, or type something up in Word, but using old hardware these days is almost never about practical

Well, there's my story. Hope I didn't bore anybody with that huge wall of text. Now I think I'll go back to digging through the forums to see what all I can learn

--Nitrogen

 

[EvanK]

>>> Hi everybody!

Hi, Dr. Nick!

 

[cosam]

Welcome!

Ah yes, AlphaServers are cool. What are you running on it just now?

As for your Compaq, both of your problems are all too familiar around these parts. If you look around you'll find a few threads discussing both. The fix for the keyboard is easy but time-consuming; basically you replace all those little foam pads and, depending on there condition, maybe the conductive discs too.

If you can get some 5.25" floppies there are a couple of ways of writing them on a modern PC so they can be read in the Compaq. The easiest is probably simply to put the 360K drive in a modern PC, if you have one that supports this.

 

[MikeS]

As you'll read in at least one of the relevant threads, if you've got a DOS system and a null-modem cable then Interlink, Laplink, etc. have a remote install option where they initially transfer themselves over the com ports to get things started.

 

[XS-Nitrogen]

Ah yes, AlphaServers are cool. What are you running on it just now?

Unfortunately nothing. It got banged against the wall carrying it down the stairs once upon a time and something got knocked loose inside I think. I haven't quite found what that something is yet. :/ I never really worried about it as I also have a PowerEdge that I've been using as a server when I need one, so I haven't spent too much time messing with the Alpha trying to get it going again. To answer the original question though, it came with NT4 Workstation installed on it (To which I was never given a password, to my frustration. I was hoping to somehow reset said password from a Linux LiveCD when the poor thing died on me).

And yes, I was trying to replace the foam pads, but wasn't having much luck making everything work. I was making them either too thick or too thin, so the contact was either always on or wouldn't work. The conductive discs all seem to be fine however. I guess I'll just have to keep trying.

That remote install for Interlink/Laplink sounds like exactly what I need. I'll look into that. Thanks