Compaq Portable III - There are no idle computers!

    They found it at the end of last year and those who found it at first did not even know what it was, since the device does not look like new laptops. I don’t even know how to classify this miracle of technology, it’s like a laptop computer, not a laptop, although it is possible and vice versa. Further, I will call it just a laptop, it’s more familiar.

    I managed to get it in exchange for a 40 gigabyte hard drive (which I got free then a few days before). True, the appearance of the laptop was terrible, but something inside me told me that the laptop is working, because it is from the 80s and is very well made, not like laptops now.
    That's how he looked when he fell into my raking hands;)

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    The laptop itself is the 286th (12 MHz), 640 kilobytes of RAM. There is no coprocessor, the hard drive should be 40 megabytes, the floppy drive 1.2 megabytes. But when he got to me, the floppy drive was not there, nor was there a hard drive (it wasn’t there 5 years ago). Someone bit the wire from the keyboard, the handle of the laptop was torn, and everything was dirty and dusty. I began, as always, by washing all the plastic parts. The first problem was that the laptop was twisted with only 6 hexagonal screws. This was the last straw in the case of buying a good set of screwdrivers for many types of 6-tigers, sprockets and other types of screws. After all, this must be twisted quite often and you must have a tool.
    So, the kit is purchased, the laptop is disassembled. I liked that there are no latches here, as in new laptops, so when parsing it, you need to bathe them in no one knows where. True, I tinkered here too, with a screen, the design there is very interesting and a bit confusing. The body was washed easily with an old toothbrush and soap. The worst thing was in the power supply. For more than 20 years, a lot of dust has accumulated inside, which in some places was like earth, it did not even blow off, it had to be chopped off, as in excavations in ancient Egypt. I just wondered how there was nothing short of when the laptop was working in the power supply. So, everything is cleaned, there are no swollen capacitors, I begin to collect. I assembled the laptop in a few days, left all the parts home, only I had to throw away the pen, instead I wanted to make a new one, but I still did not know what and how. Immediately I had to re-solder the wire in the keyboard to a new one, since the old one was almost gone. Also on the keyboard I found the donor of the DEL key, which I put on silicone. After assembling the case and the motherboard, I tried to turn on the laptop for the first time, clicked the switch and buzzed ... Hooray, the laptop works! The screen turned on, the bios wrote about all kinds of errors and also that there is no disk drive or hard drive to boot. But this is nothing, I think, most importantly, that electronics works. that there is no drive or hard drive to boot. But this is nothing, I think, most importantly, that electronics works. that there is no drive or hard drive to boot. But this is nothing, I think, most importantly, that electronics works.
    Next, I decided to connect the drive and load DOS. I want to say that the BIOS in this sense as it is not there right now, the settings program should start from a diskette or hard drive. That's why I decided to connect the drive. After reading on the Internet that it was standard 5.25 inches by 1.2 megabytes, I connected one, made a system diskette and tried to boot. It all worked! The program for configuring the parameters of CMOS-memory (bios) also started and worked. As I understand it, it is universal for many Compaq computers / laptops / laptops. I found the setup program on the Internet at the request of Compaq portable III in google.
    So, I managed to configure some parameters, but after rebooting the BIOS still cursed. I realized that it would be necessary to measure the battery voltage. Now I don’t remember how many volts there were, but not enough, here’s the reason that after the reboot the BIOS parameters “fly off”. But everything was not so simple, there was a battery inside the laptop, and a lithium one, and it was necessary to solder it to lithium too, there were no such new ones on sale, and even 3 volts. Then I decided to try, as I was advised, on the forum of the "ghost polygon" to charge the old battery. I soldered it back to the motherboard and for a long time kept the laptop turned on for several days an hour, and more. As a result, the battery began to give one and a half volts out of 3, which was enough! BIOS settings did not fly!
    Now it was up to the hard drive, I wanted to install it. I didn’t think of making a big sculpt there, but approximately the same as it was there, at 40 megabytes. Moreover, a winchester of this size came across to me the other day, some guy brought that he saw my advertisement on the door of the company about the search for old iron. I went in and said that he had two old hard drives lying around in his car, he could give it "for that" :) There was a 42 megabyte hard drive there that was fully operational and 200 non-operational. But on a laptop with a hard drive it was not so simple, it did not start. I did the settings in the BIOS settings, but after the reboot, he cursed that there was no hard drive. Like not, I thought, because it runs perfectly on other computers. I set different parameters of the hard drives so that it was 40-42 megabytes, but nothing helped. The problem "hung" for a week. I thought from time to time in the evenings

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    Well, as luck would have it there was a jumper, something like “HDD enable / disable”, and it was switched to disable :) After switching the jumper, the hard drive worked! Then a minute thing, I loaded a floppy disk, formatted the hard drive with SSTOR program on the native BIOS parameters, then FDISK and FORMAT, and now the system is already starting from the hard drive! Then again, a difficult matter. Put the hard drive and drive in the laptop basket. Before that, I started everything “in the air”: on the cables of the device were separate from the laptop. Why is it not easy? Because there were no native mounts from the basket, I had to turn the devices with different screws, make washers, drill holes in the aluminum frame of the basket. And the problem was that the drive bay was low and ordinary 1.2 megabytes of drives did not physically fit there!

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    You can see the basket in the photo, the drive must be in the compartment on the left, and the hard drive on the right, on the contrary, cannot be, since the plastic plug on the case is made of this. In the flop box in my attic I found two identical Epson SD-700A drives. They suited me, because structurally they are almost two times lower, and only the “face” of the standard size. True, one floppy drive was very dirty inside, and I even thought why I kept it, and threw it right into the trash. The second one was a little dusty, I blew it off, wiped the heads with alcohol, connected it to the computer and it didn’t work :( I turned it on, but didn’t read anything, it was on many computers and on different loops. It was in the drive. At first I didn’t know what to do, I thought for several days ... then I saw that there are jumpers on the drive, well, I think I’ll look for such a thing. Maybe they’re not so, not 1.2 megabytes.zx.pk.ru , about the configuration of several drives, there was mine, and he had wrong jumpers! Here is a picture from zx.pk.ru how jumpers should stand:

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    Ha, I think, well, the problem has been solved, rearranging jumpers, turning on the laptop and again the same thing! The drive does not read anything :( That's it, they arrived ... And now what to do, probably look for such a floppy on the Internet to buy from someone. But somehow I didn’t want to do this, and there was still time. And now the laptop lay down for a week two, I began to look at the drive, why it doesn’t work, because the appearance is normal. I took it apart, pulled all the cables, contacts, it didn’t work ... But I saw something strange, I didn’t read the diskette drive, but I didn’t try to do it, he just twisted the floppy disk and that’s all, I thought maybe this is because he doesn’t see sector 0. ud read? I know that he has to see it, when the diode enlighten hole near the center of the floppy disk, then where the head will be the beginning of the disc. I thought maybe this diode wipe, you never know ... There was no diode directly near the center of the drive, there was a prism that led to the board where the diode stood. I would not say that it was dirty, but took it off, wiped it with alcohol and a diode on the occasion too, collected everything and what would you think? Drive has earned! I did not even believe my eyes, just like a miracle! I tried several floppy disks, everything works! I’m lucky ...
    Further, everything went smoothly, put it in a basket, installed a coprocessor on the motherboard on occasion (not forgetting to switch the jumpers on the motherboard). Twisted everything, the laptop is already loading, working, reading floppy disks, beauty! But for complete happiness there was still not enough handle on top. It just had a steel plate. After some thought, I made a pen from two pieces of soft cardboard wrapped several times with dermatin and all this was glued inside with superglue. It turned out quite worthy. Here are the photos of the “suitcase” now:

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    Now the laptop is working fine, it’s comfortable enough to read something from its screen, it doesn’t hurt your eyes. After the restoration, he took pride of place in my collection of old computers, and due to its shape became one of its unusual exhibits.

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