Abusing a 90's Brother Word Processor

before we tear apart today's obscure and uh questionable 90s laptops a quick word about the sponsor of today's video shaker and spoon now usually when i choose sponsors for these videos i try to pick ones that i think would be relevant specifically to the world of tech but sometimes i pick one just because i want it shaker and spoon is a subscription service that teaches you how to make high quality cocktails with some really awesome ingredients rare and hard to find ingredients are included right in the box with house made syrups bitters garnishes infusions all nicely labeled and well packed i was honestly surprised at just how nice everything looked right out of the box each box contains all of the ingredients for about 12 cocktails minus the alcohol and all the recipes are a nice mix centered around one specific spirit again i really wanted this one this one is for me use my link in the description box below and my code action retro for 20 off your shaker and spoon subscription in the late 90s the personal computer industry progressed furiously at a breakneck pace of innovation 486 then pentiums power max processor clock speeds doubling and tripling every year the burgeoning web growing ever hungrier for raw computing power and into this fray comes brother like a glorious sloth and they say nay 386 well i've become obsessed with these underpowered goofball relics of the anything goes 90s computer industry and somehow i now have two of them so stay tuned [Music] and if you enjoy falling ever deeper into the madness that is obscure 90s computers i hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel i don't always get this philosophical at the start of my videos but when i do it's usually a lack of sleep a few weeks ago we messed around with this brother laptop from 1997. we discovered that it ran on a goofy 386 system on a chip with no real storage and represented a horrible value at hundreds of dollars in the time of powermax pentiums and rapid computing progress it was also one of the last consumer products to run a relatively full version of the super interesting gui geos or geos as some of you insist and uh you're probably right about that anyway geos was an incredibly powerful graphical environment that started out on machines like the commodore 64 and gave you a workable gui on machines like 8086s we'll explore that further in a future video but today i want to focus on another aspect of these machines the fact that they're ostensibly dos compatible and they try really really hard to run dos software we had some issues getting things to run correctly on the cga only low end super power note graphic pn9000 gr catchy but brother actually released two higher end versions with vga and backlit displays this is the grayscale one and there's also a color one that's uh impossible to find now i know you all like the whiteboard guy and uh he would just tell me to throw these things straight in the garbage but unfortunately he just couldn't be here today so we're just gonna have to solder on without them and try a whole bunch of goofy fun shenanigans with our two geo books now let's talk about exactly what we have here for the most part they're the same exact computer even though they were marketed differently when we took apart the uh pn 9000 gr last time we found a motherboard with tons of unpopulated solder pads including empty areas for a pcmcia card slot here and an area 4 modem in the back now when we look at the geo book nb60 touted as more of a full-fledged laptop it's exactly the same down to the floppy drive but there's door here with that pcmcia card slot and there is a modem on the back here exactly where the empty solder pads were on the cheaper geo book i bet if we take both of these machines apart we're gonna find the same motherboard just this one has all the stuff populated whereas this one has a whole bunch of empty solder pads i also want to do some stuff like uh combine some parts to make the best possible geo book because yeah this track pad is a little grungy and this one's quite nice most importantly i want to see how far we can push this more capable geo book maybe we can install linux probably not but i'll be darned if we're not going to try okay so we won't dwell too much on the super power note here since we already explored the heck out of it in this video here instead i want to focus on the geo book nb60 here so the biggest change over the super power note is that we have a full vga backlit grayscale lcd and color on the more expensive model it is passive matrix but uh yeah it's really not too bad and not only does it support vga on this internal grayscale screen but it supports color vga out yeah so we're actually going to get screen capture out of this thing although unfortunately we can't double screen battle station this thing it's one screen or the other but hey look at that it's geos in color alright so here's our battle station let's switch to some screen capture so since we have this running all nice and color with screen capture this is probably a good time to poke around pc geos running on top of dos now this is actually just the same exact suite of applications as on the cheaper word processor oriented geo book and yeah pretty sure this is going to be the same exact processor as well although being that this is actually geo works this is a very full featured suite of applications i mean this word processor is very modern i mean it was perfectly capable from 1997 standards even though the machine wasn't really built to 1997 standards and let's see if there were any documents on here oh yeah look at this because the other quirk of this system i think this does have non-volatile memory and i mean it definitely has non-volatile memory because look at this this is saved documents from the previous owner look at that isn't that adorable i'm going to imagine that these two are still together and they have a ton of kids and they've bought each kid their own incredibly underpowered netbook now i'm curious about internet here because this seems to be a little bit more set up than the previous one we have a web browser a setup here which that has somebody's login information from 20 years ago but i took a look at the web browser earlier when i first got this machine and i was very surprised to see this check this out yeah look in their bookmarks here i'll blur out these uh 20 year old email addresses although i don't think prodigy is even still around but somebody was using this and they were doing ebay stuff how cool is that to see 20 years later on this extremely underpowered machine with 30 year old technology yeah somebody was really using this for its intended purpose back in the day but i want to check out the drawing application now that i have well a mouse and we have color and screen capture let's see if i can do uh my thumbnails from here all right looking pretty good now let's try to draw something here let's draw a macintosh uh really hourglass after drawing a square okay well true test of any drawing program how well can it follow a fastly drawn line uh-oh contains a large number of unsaved changes i think we hit the ram limit here let's look at what i find most interesting file manager and i find this most interesting really because this is the best look at the geos running under the hood and uh yeah especially once you go into windowed mode here and start opening up some overlapping windows and dragging them around this is what pc geos looks like and if you recognize some of these window controls here that's because it's using the motif ui components used by other guise like the cde common desktop environment and that is pretty cool okay so now it's time to try some hackery on this thing i discovered a couple secrets that have been uh hidden for years or maybe just nobody cared enough to preserve them but i found some startup key trickery that we can do for instance if i turn the machine on and just spam the f5 key really freaking spam the f5 key check it out it says bypassing config.sis and autoexec.bat and from here i can just go directly into romdos622 and that is very helpful i also found another one by spamming the f8 key where it does kind of an interactive prompt for uh i don't know whatever it wants to do but that one's not so interesting to me and how did i discover these startup keys you may ask did i do some really cool disassembly of the rom no even better does this one do anything damn it does this one do anything damn it does this one do anything all right and since we're in dos we can run some dos software starting with let's see exactly what's in this machine oh yeah 33 megahertz 386 exactly as we thought but this really confirms that it's almost the same machine as the brother power note it's the 386 sx 33 megahertz with an att computer name a bios in 1997 but this one has four megs of ram so yeah at least that's an upgrade okay so i want to try some external storage on here and uh yeah i have a backpack parallel cd-rom drive and i also have a pc card cd-rom drive but i can't seem to find it i wonder where it could be oh how did you get out thanks uh buddy okay so i can't get these cd-rom drives to work although it actually powers my cool vaio pc card cd-rom drive from the slot here the machine hangs during boot if this thing is plugged in and the backpack i suspect the reason it doesn't work is because it's not loading the cd-rom driver for dos even though i have that driver mscdex on this disc i just can't figure out how to get it to work i also tried a parallel zip drive but uh it will not see this at all so yeah i have one other thing that i want to try this is a pc card cf adapter and a 512 meg cf card and uh yeah this adapter has worked in every old computer i've ever tried it in so let's give it a shot in here and there it is look at that pc card i know i have free dos on here from when i was i think playing around with my toshiba libretto so uh yeah i wonder how much of this would actually work on here so let's try some freedos games look it's flappy bird oh i mean it runs and it registers the key press surprisingly oh that's actually really exciting okay does not run very fast though so we have dos compatibility vga in a 386 we've got to try wolfenstein 3d now i let it load into geos so that we have a mouse driver because that's how i like to play wolfenstein hey all right now will the keyboard work so far so good oh man if this works i'm gonna be so excited there's no audio for some reason oh i pushed the down arrow and it interpreted that as enter i guess oh no nothing works i think it is not gonna work with this keyboard i know what we can run dos demo scene stuff and uh this first one here i'm almost positive is gonna work because it is everyone's favorite bad apple demo done in 8086 assembler and it should run on pretty much any 8086 and up processor plus the music is done to the pc speaker which makes sense on this machine because i think that's the only sound it has so here we go oh yeah look at that [Music] okay so all the other demos either didn't launch or crashed uh spectacularly so there's one thing left to do let's try to get linux to boot all right so we are going to use something called load ling which is an old school way to load linux from dos and when this loads linux it actually replaces dos in memory with linux and the linux i've chosen is debian 1.5.1 i think because the system requirements require less than four megs of ram and i think that's about the latest version of debian that could potentially work on this system so there is a file here called boot.bat which runs loadlin.exe for the linux file the compressed system and uh runs it into a ram disk and uh yeah let's see if this works so all we should need to do here is just type boot hey it's going how look at that uncompressing linux oh my god look it's booting the kernel it sees the floppy drive is fd0 now it sees hda1 the compressed image found at block 0. uh-oh i have discovered a problem keyboard unrecognized scan code yeah once again the curse of this goofy non-standard keyboard and it's uh i guess incorrect scan codes that this machine's bios makes up for but linux can not make heads or tails of at least this old version of linux well that's a shame but hey technically i think it did boot linux it just can't do anything else all right let's rip this thing open and see what's inside okay so i've got both machines apart here and just as we suspected it is the same motherboard between the two machines just the geo book is fully populated and the super power note is missing a lot of those components okay so thank you so much for indulging me in my strange new obsession with these super goofy brother geo books i don't know what it is about these things i just i can't stop messing with it whether it's the obscurity of it or the fact that it runs kind of the last gasp of geos the fact that it's so limited but we can kind of finesse it into doing some things it was never intended for or just the fact that brother was so brash to try to hawk a 386 machine in the late 90s i feel like there's more we can do with these machines still and hopefully you want to see it because i think maybe we can find some way to get this thing to boot linux off of that cf card and get around the limitation of the goofball keyboard maybe some later versions of the kernel can actually deal with this or maybe we can figure out some way to remap the keyboard i don't know good thing i have some pretty smart linux friends anyway that'll do it for this video i hope you enjoyed it and i hope you like this geo book stuff because ah i i just love this stupid thing but if you enjoyed this video i'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more geos shenanigans like this please subscribe down below thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to alberto guiller camila nosada chris allegretta chris briggs chris calderon chris nelson cobalt retro tech control alt reese daniel hubbard greg from rutkin mods paul spencer ryan scott thompson and sutek who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping to make these videos possible

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 56,025

Keywords: retro, vintage computers, macintosh, apple, retrocomputing, retro computers

Id: PYeY8fWUyO8

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 20 2022