Dauphin DTR-1: The 486 Touchscreen PC from 1992!

the form factor for notebook computers has been well established for decades but there was a time when the industry was still trying to figure out what worked best and one company had a very different idea [Music] [Music] in the late 1980s portable computers were changing their shape the original bulky luggable machines were giving away to slim Sleek laptops but some companies were experimenting with alternative designs and input methods and dolphin Technologies dtr1 was a prime example this unit crossed my path thanks to Amanda the gaming department manager at free geek Twin Cities it launched in 1993 at a price of twenty five hundred dollars U.S the packaging was interesting as the system was split across three boxes the first held the computer itself along with its AC adapter the second box contained a carrying case inside of which was the detachable keyboard and the third box held what was left which was mostly just installation disks and manuals the dtr1 itself feels quite dense the exterior is all plastic and doesn't reveal much at first glance with the exception of a keyboard port on the right side on the bottom left is a removable cover for the rechargeable battery and it looks like this particular unit got a replacement at some point but the dtr1 has more connectors they're simply hidden by part of the casing which slides off doing so reveals the power parallel and external video ports on the right side on the bottom is an expansion connector for the optional external floppy or hard drive and the top holds the 9600 baud modem ethernet connector and serial port I plugged in the external keyboard which just uses a standard PS2 interface then pulled out the AC adapter dolphin did its best to make this compact just like the computer but unfortunately it carries a serious flaw not enough attention was paid to cooling so they have a tendency to run so hot as to melt their casing I'm definitely going to skip using this one and go with a modern adapter instead the other challenge I faced was the pointing device inside the carrying case was the dtr1 stylus but it seen better days the cap on the end had broken off with a random piece of plastic acting as a substitute this is a problem because it's a so-called active stylus it needs a battery to power circuitry inside that emits radio waves which the touchscreen on the computer picks up to determine its location but I wasn't convinced this stylus would work reliably so I came up with an alternative I was able to pick up a New Old Stock stylus on eBay it's not an exact match but some research suggests that it should be compatible it didn't come with batteries so I had to supply my own a quadruple a cell which yes is apparently a thing it takes just one and hopefully would be all the dtr1 would need to get working after plugging in the power the unit turned on automatically and aside from a warning that the CMOS settings had been reset due to the clock battery being dead it seemed to boot just fine these came pre-installed with a special touch screen specific version of Windows 3.1 and the question now was did that touch screen actually work I hovered the pen over the surface and it looks like the answer is yes viewing angles on LCDs weren't that great when machines like this were new so I propped it up against the box to see the screen more clearly you use the stylus like a mouse to navigate but it's clear that dolphin didn't pre-install a whole lot more than just the basics while the keyboard would no doubt be the best for long typing sessions the other trick you could pull with the stylus is to jot notes but with this machine coming from the early 90s when handwriting recognition was still being figured out it's not terribly accurate it missed a lot of inputs and even though I was doing my best to write legibly it often got the shapes wrong the most frustrating experience was trying to use the spreadsheet program pencil the combination of relatively small cells and the bad recognition hit rate meant that I'd be lucky if it entered the data I wanted it to maybe it's for the best then that the version dolphin included was just a demo even the game selection was pretty lackluster and frustrating dolphin included its own version of tic-tac-toe to show off the capabilities of the stylus but even that didn't work well only picking up my inputs correctly just a few times considering I can move around in Windows decently enough I suspect this is just how it was with all of these units and not something that was wrong with only this one otherwise the dtr1 is kind of boring you need the stylus to adjust the screen's contrast and brightness though both did work well and the six inch monochrome LCDs 640 by 480 resolution offered a reasonable amount of working space for the ERA with all of those external ports the idea was that you could hook up a monitor and accessories to use the unit like a desktop and to get a lot of work done that probably would have been the best idea a different keyboard would definitely have been a requirement in that scenario for two reasons the included one works okay but its right angle connector blocks the monitor port and frankly it's horrible to type on it's smaller than normal which probably isn't surprising but its key feel really ruins the experience this one is somehow both mushy and firm at the same time and while I'm definitely not the best typist I feel like my accuracy was only marginally better than if I'd been using the handwriting recognition that dolphin was able to pack this much technology into a computer this size certainly is commendable though its weight of two and a half pounds or just over a kilogram is much less than what the typical PC notebook clocked in at it was relatively convenient to carry around too with its case holding both the unit and its keyboard in such a way that they can be used while open but this wasn't ideal not just because it made the setup top heavy but also because no room was left inside for the power adapter I suspected there wasn't much space left inside the dtr1 itself either so I was eager to take it apart the battery came out then I could remove the four screws on the left side a few remaining screws were hidden by the port cover which let me remove a metal bracket surrounding them and it appears I'm not the first one in here with the remnants of a warranty void sticker on the top corner the bottom cover lifted off to reveal the motherboard I was glad to find that all the Caps here were of the tantalum variety which don't leak over time like electrolytic ones do on this side of the board was the CPU a 25 megahertz 486 chip from cyrix but next to it was another sign of this machine's interesting story it had actually been manufactured under contract by IBM the dtr1 had a unique hard drive and I wanted to check it out so I lifted up the motherboard there were a couple of ribbon cables on one end that went to the screen and the other end had the backlight cables connected to a daughter card but that card easily popped off the board so I could hinge it out of the way I got the box back out for the motherboard to lean on I would have removed it entirely except those ribbon cables looked somewhat fragile especially since they had been secured with hot glue the last thing I'd want to do is tear one of them just behind them is the hard drive which was very different than what normally came in PC laptops it's a 1.3 inch unit called the Kitty Hawk and uses an IDE interface that series had been produced as a collaboration between Hewlett-Packard at T and the Citizen watch company and was the smallest mechanical Drive made when it launched in mid 1992. it was pretty advanced technology for its time packing up to 40 megabytes of data and even including an accelerometer to park the heads and prevent damage if dropped it was very expensive though and ultimately didn't prove popular with laptop manufacturers selling only about a hundred and sixty thousand units by the time it was discontinued just two years later Kitty Hawk was such a costly failure in fact that in 1996 Hewlett Packard ended up getting out of the hard drive business entirely but the drive was the right choice for the dtr1 because it left room for other parts like this Ram card nearby my machine has four megabytes on board but an optional upgrade was to step up to the maximum six megabytes the clock battery is positioned next to the PC speaker the only form of audio dolphin chose to include also nearby is the one electrolytic capacitor I could find in the whole machine which looks to still be in good shape but I added it to my list to replace at a later time the machine went back together without an issue except it looks like whoever was here before forgot to reinstall one screw but the back cover fit like it should and I could finish buttoning it all up the dtr1 has some notoriety in retro Computing circles for being one of the earliest pen based PCS but it wasn't dolphin's first product that said it would prove to be one of its last dolphin technology had gotten its start in the late 80s producing more ordinary notebooks with its first product being the 286 based lap Pro in the coming few years it would offer several more models featuring faster CPUs they were generally competitive with machines from other manufacturers but as the 90s saw a race to the bottom in prices the company sought to produce something more unique and thus the dtr1 was born of course it wasn't the only pen based computer on the market but its small size garnered attention from the Press dolphin had secured contracts with the U.S government for its laptop line but when it pivoted to the dtr1 Uncle Sam wasn't as interested and neither were consumers common criticisms of the device included its poor battery life of just an hour and a half small hard drive at either 20 or 40 megabytes clumsy form factor that was too small to use as a laptop but too large to use handheld for very long and of course the poor handwriting recognition that came with Windows reportedly only 4 000 DTR ones had been sold by mid 1994 a year after launch Dolphin tried to address the concerns with a follow-up model the dtr2 which included a larger hard drive pcmcia expansion card slot and sound circuitry to support primitive voice recognition but it didn't sell any better and the overall weak Palm top PC market didn't help matters dolphin had bet big and massively failed becoming saddled with debt from its manufacturing contract with IBM in 1995 the company ended up filing for bankruptcy and laying off all its employees story doesn't end there dolphin managed to secure new investors along with new management and between those two was able to not just climb out of bankruptcy but also acquire a few other companies over the next several years while it would primarily operate as a holding company dolphin didn't completely forget its Computing Heritage in 1998 it launched what would be its final tablet PC called the oracis named after the Greek word provision it featured a color display and much faster Pentium processor but saw modest sales so dolphin decided to focus on its other business units ultimately dolphin ended up in a so-called reverse merger with biotechnology firm geovax in 2006 adopting that company's name and focusing on the medical industry that was a very different result for a company that had followed in the footsteps of many others pivot from profitable but plain products to chase the latest technology Trend just to fall flat and struggle to recover the dtr1 never became the desktop replacement that its name reflected but it was still a small yet important step in the evolution of personal computing [Music] [Music] thank you

Channel: This Does Not Compute

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Id: KwcN1II8ZXI

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023