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recovered a "family heirloom" laptop of sorts

Mike Chambers

Veteran Member
Joined
Sep 2, 2006
Messages
2,621
when i was a little kid, like 6-12 or so we had this TRAC 201N turbo 286 laptop. it's the first laptop we ever owned, but it ended up being given to my uncle for his business. he and my aunt got divorced about 12 years ago, and i figured this thing had been long since thrown in a junkyard somewhere.

anyway, today i went out to his place to help him start to develop a web site for his company and the subject came up of how huge today's hard drives are compared to 20 years ago. i mentioned "like that old laptop we gave you" and he stopped for a second and said "actually, i still have it right here in the corner do you want it back?"

you could guess my answer, and here she is in all her 16-bit glory as i took the pic tonight:

286laptop.jpg


:jumping7:

they don't build computers today like they used. everything about this laptop is more or less like new still. works flawlessly except the floppy drive can act a bit flaky. not a big deal. i can replace it eventually, and until then i have my xircom ethernet/parallel adapter to transfer data.

the hard drive is still as silent as it was when new and extremely fast with no errors. it's a 20 MB MFM in there. i've clocked it reading data at around close to a couple hundred KB/s.

anyway, i took a ton of higher res pictures of the inside and outside if anybody wants to see. inside, because i opened it up hoping to find an IDE drive that i could have replaced with the 125 MB one out of my 486 laptop. (which has since been upgraded to a 6 GB)

http://rubbermallet.org/286lappy/PICT0613.JPG
http://rubbermallet.org/286lappy/PICT0614.JPG
http://rubbermallet.org/286lappy/PICT0615.JPG
http://rubbermallet.org/286lappy/PICT0616.JPG
http://rubbermallet.org/286lappy/PICT0617.JPG
http://rubbermallet.org/286lappy/PICT0618.JPG
http://rubbermallet.org/286lappy/PICT0619.JPG
http://rubbermallet.org/286lappy/PICT0620.JPG
http://rubbermallet.org/286lappy/PICT0621.JPG
http://rubbermallet.org/286lappy/PICT0622.JPG
http://rubbermallet.org/286lappy/PICT0623.JPG

i'm just a bit excited. found a lot of little games i used to play as a kid still on the drive. bringing back all kinds of memories. :)

currently i'm tinkering around with a bit of Turbo C++ on it. oh, and it actually has a VGA adapter in it! that shocked me. it's been so long i forgot.
 
thanks, the excitement will wear down soon. it's just that i expected it to be under 2 tons of garbage somewhere. :p
 
what's kinda funny is i found these three lines at the bottom of it's autoexec.bat that i don't remember writing:

Code:
@echo off
echo UNCLE PAUL!! PLEASE REMEMBER TO GIVE MIKE THE LAPTOP BACK WHEN YOU ARE DONE!!
echo PLEASE DON'T FORGET!!

it took a while but he did lawlz.
 
That must have cost a lot when new.

Also where have you been I have not seen you online since a week ago
 
here's something you guys won't believe... the old CMOS barrel battery in there still works.i couldn't even see any corrosion around it at all.

õ_ô
 
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