xdaniel

Hey there~

📜 Hobby programmer, ROM hacker, retro computers & consoles, anime & manga fan, sometimes NSFW?

🌐 🇩🇪/native, 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇦🇺/good, 🇯🇵/へた

🔒 @xdn-desync

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⛏️ The Cutting Room Floor
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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

it's not all that often that I buy something "as a collector" but I found this T1100 Plus and got it for a song, complete with the original branded carrying case, and that's pretty cool if you ask me. The T1100 is incredibly important to the history of the PC, the first commercially successful PC laptop, and arguably they got everything right on the first try. works, too.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

things are going well, but I am now involved in a bug thread on GitHub. you see, linux won't boot


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

it's a fully stocked PC, it has everything you could have asked for. serial, parallel, video out in both TTL AND COMPOSITE (!), dual floppy drives, full-travel keyboard. the only thing it's missing is a backlit screen, which was actually not automatically a desirable feature in 85.

I made a post a while ago joking that if I had a time machine I'd just go back to the 80s and 90s and get old electronics when they were new. Seems someone around your area has been doing just that... only logical explanation.

The owner's manual has a delightful table showing charge time vs. operating time. After 8 hours of charging, the unit will supposedly pick up 7.5 hours of usable battery life. And the unit will only charge when it's powered off, so better remember to plug it into the outlet in the motel after a hard day's work on the road in the sales factory.

I do kind of believe that in original condition, the battery might have lasted nearly as long as advertised. This is a machine with no hard drive, I don't remember it having a fan, and the display has no backlight. The OS is stored in ROM and the base-spec model only had one floppy drive. So you'd load your word processor or Lotus 1-2-3 into memory from the application disk, then swap disks and load your document. Once you were done that, the only thing drawing power (until you spin up the floppy disk again to save your work) is the solid state logic.

Yeah, idk - mine pulls a significant amount of current when operating, about .5A at 9V / 4.5 watts. The battery pack looks to be four sub-Cs, maybe - let's be generous - 1500 mAh each. Together that pack is going to be about 6.7 watt-hours, so in theory i should get, tops, an hour and a half. It's possible I'm seeing combined charge & operating current, but if it is true that it only charges when powered off, then I'm not.

Weird! I have the base model T1100 in storage somewhere and it's been nearly twenty years since I turned it on, so take my memories with a very large grain of salt, but I recall getting nearly an hour of battery life out of it even then, nearly twenty years old as the machine would have been at that point. I wonder if it consumes much less power when it's clocked down to 4.77MHz and they did the battery calculations based on that, or if yours has a current leak somewhere.

I didn't think to try down clocking, I'll do that today and see if it makes a difference. It's also possible that mine is suffering from electrically leaky caps that are acting as high resistance shorts, or that the battery really is eating current while the machine is running. In retrospect I'm positive it charged while operating, because I had it turned on the whole time it was plugged in, yet the battery did manage to pick up enough charge that I could unplug the machine and it kept running for at least a few minutes. So perhaps most of this is charging current, and if I disconnect the battery internally I can get a better idea of the real power consumption.