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Some IBM PC 110 Pics!

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kishy

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I have recently purchased three "untested junk" IBM Palm Top PC 110s from Japan. Two of the three have been received; the third is coming soon (I think I'll be getting the delivery attempt card today).

You may view pics I've taken so far here: https://imgur.com/a/3JbJDqG

So far I've had both of them completely apart and cleaned up battery leakage of the murderous little NiMH backup batteries. Both of them appear to be 100% functional except one has a trash screen. The third in transit also has a trash screen.

Edit: I kind of intended to put this in portables. If a mod is feeling bored, please shuffle it over there when you can.
 
Agent Orange said:
Kishy, nice work on your photo presentation.
Click to expand...

Thanks! I figure since the average person has never seen one of these little guys, and the average person also never will, I might as well provide some decent eye candy. I have not yet found any similar size and quality pics of these, but they may be out there and just hard to find.

Caleb Hansberry said:
Very cool! I'm curious what happened to the one with the big spot in it's screen, taking up the whole thing...
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It's a really common failure on these, it seems. Some sort of delamination of the different layers of the panel which may or may not be reversible with special processes. I'm told it may relate to a specific set of climate details about parts of Japan...temperature and humidity...if you browse Japanese auctions for vintage computing equipment you'll see LCDs over there seem to break down much worse than they do here.

I'm hoping the degradation that has began on my good one will not get worse, but that's optimistic.

The original screen is an almost impossible to source part, so sooner or later, someone will need to tackle the topic of retrofitting something newer and more plentiful.
 
Congratulations on the repairs. These are very intricate devices and taking them apart and putting them back together is not easy by any means.

Did you replace the internal battery pack or just leave it out after removing it? I took mine apart, removed the battery but the damage was too far gone on the board. Sad, really, but that's the way it goes.
 
snuci said:
Congratulations on the repairs. These are very intricate devices and taking them apart and putting them back together is not easy by any means.

Did you replace the internal battery pack or just leave it out after removing it? I took mine apart, removed the battery but the damage was too far gone on the board. Sad, really, but that's the way it goes.
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You could say that again...ridiculously compact assembly of stuff in these. And nothing just "lifts" straight off either. Everything comes out at weird angles.

I actually broke the bodge wire during cleaning, though it was one of the corroded terminals, so I was being a little rougher with it than I would be otherwise. Vinegar cleaned the board up really well, followed by a rinse in warm water, followed by dousing it in rubbing alcohol, followed by the hair dryer. The component I had to reattach the wire to is easy to get at and not microscopic, so it was easy as far as surface mount stuff goes.

I removed the batteries and did not reinstall them. My understanding is it is not the CMOS battery; this is just a standby battery to allow hotswapping batteries without the AC adapter. There is a lithium coin cell which I'm sure you're also aware of. The machine should work completely normal in the absence of the NiMH battery unless I'm missing something.
 
I received the third one (of three) last night. I have added the photos to the imgur album accessible via the same link (https://imgur.com/a/3JbJDqG). I have arranged the photos in order, successfully, so the new ones show up after the closeup of the AC adapter specs.

New one had minor battery corrosion but no PCB damage. Cleaned it successfully.
LCD is screwed. It displays stuff, but it's screwed. Video is present on imgur. Apologies for how awful it is, and it being vertical, it was recorded with Facebook Messenger to be sent directly to a friend but I later realized it's the only image I have of the third screen.
The motherboard appears to work but I have not swapped my good LCD to it, to verify the flickering is entirely the LCD and not at all the motherboard.
I don't really want to take my 'good one' apart again, at least not soon.
This unit came with a 16MB RAM upgrade in it! I have transferred that into my 'good one'. The other two both came with a 4MB module.
This unit came with a 15MB (fifteen??) CF card, which contains some application, but it doesn't want to launch from the DOS/J prompt so I think this machine probably had a PCMCIA HDD in it at some point.

I pulled the non-flickering, non-displaying LCD out of its lid assembly for reference pics. Since it's junk, it's staying out of the computer.

Plans moving forward include getting a PCMCIA HDD or appropriately sized CF card (CF seems preferable) and putting Win95 on the good one. 20MB of RAM is adequate for that and then some.

My models for reference are:
2431-YD1: the completely working one. Has DOS/J in flash. Came to me with 8MB of RAM (4 on board plus 4 on module). Now upgraded to 20MB (4+16).
2431-YDW: the first bad screen one. No display at all but panel lights up. Does not seem to have DOS in flash. Came with 8MB of RAM. Motherboard tested out OK by swapping screens with above.
2431-YDW: the second bad screen one. Flickering display on garbage panel. Does not seem to have DOS in flash. Came with 20MB of RAM; 16 has been moved to YD1 above. On a high level, we can see the motherboard works, but to what extent/reliability is unknown.
 
When you had the monitor housings apart did you notice any leakage signs from t e caps on the LCD assembly?
I have always been curious if that was partly to blame why my PC110 has really weird contrast issues for the first few minutes while warming up.
 
I was completely unfamiliar with these until i opened this thread. I want one!!
 
NeXT said:
When you had the monitor housings apart did you notice any leakage signs from t e caps on the LCD assembly?
I have always been curious if that was partly to blame why my PC110 has really weird contrast issues for the first few minutes while warming up.
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I think I answered this in IRC but in case I didn't:
I only disassembled one of the 'bad' display assemblies, and in fact have since totally destroyed the LCD in the course of trying to investigate what goes wrong with them.

It is a lot more than merely the polarizer somehow "going bad" or the polarizer adhesive unsticking. Something is happening inside the layers of glass which makes this happen, as far as I can tell.

But anyway, in the one I took apart, I didn't see visible leakage but it did feel kind of wet when I was handling it. Hard to describe, but there may have been some sort of moisture in there. There are a lot of electrolytic caps, so leakage and wandering out of spec is not unreasonable at all at this age.

My friend theorized that cap leakage could be a contributor to the physical breakdown of the LCD (exposure to electrolyte). No way to prove or disprove that at present.

The best path forward for these is almost certainly to replace all the LCD screens. I won't call it a lost cause to fix the existing ones, but it's probably way more hassle than it's worth.

A-ko said:
I was completely unfamiliar with these until i opened this thread. I want one!!
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Even some fairly seasoned retro tech enthusiasts find these to be a bit of a surprise. "An IBM PC what?"

They're neat little machines, but very limited in a few key respects, and definitely a niche market item/at this point probably only a novelty item. There is certainly no practical way to make this device a reasonable computer in 2018 (or 2019 for that matter). The necessary two-finger typing makes it an awful word processor and limited IO means it's complicated to get your work onto something else. If one felt so inclined, one could use a Pentium laptop as their daily work computer today...486 maybe a little less so...and this thing, absolutely not at all.

I would probably feel foolish about spending the money to import these from Japan, were it not for how cheap I got them compared to the prices they command once already on this continent.
 
kishy said:
I'm hoping the degradation that has began on my good one will not get worse, but that's optimistic.
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Sorry for the very late response, but I figured no reason to be starting a new thread. Have you looked at your PC110 recently, has the screen deteriorated further?

I am in a similar situation with some OK screens and some destroyed screens. I'm going to attempt the TFT retrofit on one of them, but I am looking at how to preserve an original one so when I pull it out in another 10 years it is not completely destroyed.
 
yyzkevin said:
Sorry for the very late response, but I figured no reason to be starting a new thread. Have you looked at your PC110 recently, has the screen deteriorated further?

I am in a similar situation with some OK screens and some destroyed screens. I'm going to attempt the TFT retrofit on one of them, but I am looking at how to preserve an original one so when I pull it out in another 10 years it is not completely destroyed.
Click to expand...

I have a Toshiba Satellite 400CDT that has also developed this kind of polarization damage while sitting in storage (the screen was perfect when I purchased it). I did some research to find out what causes this damage, and apparently the cellulose acetate these polarizes are made from decay through a process known as "vinegar syndrome". Long story short, high temperature and humidity causes the acetyl groups to detach from their cellulose bonds, which causes the polarizer to warp out of shape. Here's a diagram of what this looks like on a reflective LCD.
polarizer-diagram.jpg

This breakdown also produces acetic acid, which gives off a vinegar odor. I notice that my Toshiba started to smell like vinegar after the polarizer of the LCD had gone bad; this is why. (I have a HP 95LX whose polarizer is just starting to decay, but it doesn't smell of vinegar... yet.)

The only fix seems to be peeling off the damaged polarizer and applying a new one. It looks like a pain in the ass though, as you have to be careful peeling the polarizer off, otherwise the glass layer which holds the liquid crystal in will shatter. If that happens, you're hosed unless you can find a replacement panel. You also have to clean off all the old adhesive, ensure there's no dust on the surface of the glass layer before you apply the new polarizer, and ensure that the orientation of the new polarizer is correct otherwise the screen won't be visible.
 

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I peeled the layers off one to get to the actual lcd below, but it seemed to have tiny cracks which I was not sure if they were there or I introduced them, and there was no picture being displayed when I tried to look through polarizing lenses.

I contemplated trying it on another one, but it is not easy. I noticed two units so far sold on yahoo auctions by the same seller, advertising repaired screens. One is listed now
 
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