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Lack Of Information On The Internet About GRiD Systems

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Paralel

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Does anyone know why there is such a lack of information about GRiD systems on the internet?

Information on most systems and hardware from most manufacturers of the contemporaneous time period (early 1990's) is relatively easy to come by, but it seems like information on GRiD systems, besides what people have been able to scrap together or reverse engineered themselves, is very sparse.

Is it just because information has disappeared over time, as I remember there being a few GRiD sites from about 4 years ago that I found useful that no longer seem to exist. Or is it that there was never much information on them in the first place?
 
There is a lot of info out there but it does seem like some of it, such as certain schematics and software, have vaporized with time. I haven't encountered any major mysteries, what information do you seek?
 
Is the 1755 a regular consumer grade laptop branded as GRiD? My notes (probably from online reading, so take it for what that's worth) indicate the following machines listed below may be the same hardware. The closest machine I posses today is a 1720 and it doesn't look rugged at all, in fact it doesn't seem to share any characteristics with the GridCase models... and unfortunately it's in absolute shambles. I think it's either a re-branded Tandy, or perhaps just a generic OEM that was branded and resold by the four big names listed below. It reminds me in the 90's and 00's there were a lot of generic and name brand machines that seemed identical. I think a company called Clevo (off the top of my head) may have been the OEM for a lot of name brands (I'm talking Pentium and up). I recall selling many new laptops (Pentium 3 or 4?) branded 'Spartan' but they were identical to many other brands including Asus, etc. I think there was a lot of that going on because it must be quite expensive to actually engineer and manufacture your own custom gear. I dealt in quite a few GRiD's much earlier in my career but those were our traditional GRiDCase type models.

Additional: The 1755 (386SX model) has a Headland chipset which in my opinion were pretty feature rich, one of my favorites. Those are pretty well documented online so from a technical standpoint there is actually a lot of nitty-gritty information available which can be useful for repairs, learning, and modding. The 1755's 386SX chip was socketed which wasn't the most common thing to do as those CPU's were commonly soldered down.. 2MB onboard ram with room to add either a 4MB or 6MB module. 2.5" IDE hard drive interface. Power supply input 110/240VAC, output 16V 1.25A (GRiD part number G25-4205) OEM'd by Delta (good stuff).

You probably already have this info but here's the list that I think may be the same.

Grid 1755
Tandy 3820HD
DECpc 320p
Panasonic CF-380
 
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Yep, the socketed CPU is extremely unusual for that era, especially for a laptop. The GRiD corporation also created a unique variant of this series of laptops, which were all Matsushita derivatives. The 1755 486/SLC was their unique model that cludged a Cx486SLC-20 into the system. They adapted the system to handle the processor's unique features in hardware by using patch wires, a couple dozen of them. I am going to document all their adaptions so it is possible for anyone with a 386SX and a similar chipset to duplicate their work.

I also further plan to replace the Cx486SLC-20 with a TI486SXLC2-40 (basically a clock doubled Cx486SLC-20 with an 8k cache rather than a 1k cache) to maximize the system and its socketed CPU. Despite people saying the Cx486SLC and the TI486SLC/SLC2 are pin compatible, they aren't, but the differences are small and easy to adapt.

I just wish I could find user manuals, basically any documentation that is original to the system.
 
Dagwood said:
There is a lot of info out there but it does seem like some of it, such as certain schematics and software, have vaporized with time. I haven't encountered any major mysteries, what information do you seek?
Click to expand...

I have seen a few pieces of software out there which have made it into hands who either archived it or acknowledged they have it, but the archives remain private. I think the Compass with the Shuttle software is still not something publically archived because doing so would devalue their own system.

I did archive what I think was the entire file archive for the Yahoo! group back in 2010 or so. It's about 11mb.
 
NeXT said:
I have seen a few pieces of software out there which have made it into hands who either archived it or acknowledged they have it, but the archives remain private. I think the Compass with the Shuttle software is still not something publically archived because doing so would devalue their own system.

I did archive what I think was the entire file archive for the Yahoo! group back in 2010 or so. It's about 11mb.
Click to expand...
You did? Is the file archive available anywhere?

Dagwood said:
There is a lot of info out there but it does seem like some of it, such as certain schematics and software, have vaporized with time. I haven't encountered any major mysteries, what information do you seek?
Click to expand...
One system I can't find much about is the systems made by the US company is the 2350. From what I can find, it's either a member of or successor to the 22xx series of systems. Info on any of the 3xxx series is nonexistent as far as I can tell. The info on the 4xxx series is also very limited. There isn't much of any information on the 4025 or the 4025LX. A little more is known about the 4025NC, but not much. As far as I can tell there is no information on the 4033LX, nor the 4000LX, 4000SX, 4016DX, or the 4020LX.

If you can provide any insight on these systems, I'd be quite interested.
 
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I can put it in my Google drive and make it a public file, so it's freely searchable and downloadable to anyone, you don't need a Google account to download the file when it is in public mode. I'll post a direct link here. I've hosted files there for 8 years without trouble.
 
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