1987 Toshiba T3200 gas plasma laptop

[Homer J Simpson]

Here is a good one from VWestlife  https://www.youtube.com/user/vwestlife/videos


Remember plasma displays?

[lwatts666]

My shoulder hurts just remembering how heavy that *&@% machine was.

I spent many long nights in hotel rooms writing PL/M-86 code to that soothing orange glow.

[Brumby]

Never had access to one - but I remember seeing a rather large monitor when working at a financial institution.  It was so big, the screen was divided into 4x 3270 displays.

It definitely had the WOW factor back then.

[Keicar]

I remember using one of those - the keyboard was an absolute delight, as I recall.

[jh15]

Think I still have my toshiba plasma. Was quite legible, loud fan, ac only, and gravity impaired. Ran msdos, Info Select PIM. Could read it across the room.

[jimdeane]

I would really love to find a VGA input monochrome gas plasma monitor.

I don't know why. I just want one. And an EL monitor.  I kind of have a thing for the 80's GRiD computers, no idea why, I never touched one.

[WattSekunde]

This nice T3100 is so heavy and always needs a power cord. But it's working after all these years! Maybe I have to try to repair the screen.

[JulietMikeBravo]

Love those displays. Flat, but with an old school monochrome color.

Also makes me think of the sentry turrents in aliens 

https://www.youtube.com/embed/HQDy-5IQvuU

[dexters_lab]

a friend of mine had one back in the day, weighed a ton and had no battery but did look very cool. IIRC they were big enough to take ISA expansion cards

[james_s]

Those neon plasma displays are great, my friend has an old Compaq lunchbox PC that has one. It's much nicer to look at than the monochrome passive matrix LCDs of the era.

[timb]

This nice T3100 is so heavy and always needs a power cord. But it's working after all these years! Maybe I have to try to repair the screen.

You basically have to replace the display. I've got one from a Compaq Portable III that only has two bad lines on it, if you need it. (AFAIK they're the exact same displays.)

Here's my fully restored, pimped out Portable III hooked up to a GPIB debugger:



While the original 20MB Seagate hard drive still worked, I decided to replace it with solid state storage. The Portable III was the first machine to ship with an IDE interface, so I was able to replace it a CF card. Unfortunately the BIOS didn't allow custom drive types, so I ended up having to flash an EEPROM with the XTIDE BIOS, which I installed in the ROM slot of an EtherLink III card. Now I can boot from the CF card via the built-in IDE connection!




I also added an i287XL Math Coprocessor (which is really just an i387) and replaced the UART with something a bit faster.





Finally, the motherboard originally had a square Keeper II battery plugged in which fed power to a separate Motorola RTC/NVRAM chip. Unfortunately those batteries can no longer be found. I originally tried replacing it with a LiR2230 battery in a coin cell holder, with a resistor to limit charge current, however it didn't work well. I ended up just pulling the RTC chip and replacing it with a brand new Maxim BBRTC/SRAM chip that is functionally and electrically equivalent to the original Motorola chip, that way a separate battery is no longer needed. It seems to work perfectly! (Thanks to Maxim for sending me free samples!)



Such a great little machine!

[james_s]

That's identical to the Compaq my friend has. IIRC I replaced the old battery with a CR2032 in a holder, I don't believe the original was rechargeable.

Anyone ever tried repairing one of the screens? While not a plasma screen, I fixed several original Nintendo Game Boys that had a similar symptom by rubbing a soldering iron over the ribbon cable where it bonded to the glass.

[WattSekunde]

This nice T3100 is so heavy and always needs a power cord. But it's working after all these years! Maybe I have to try to repair the screen.

You basically have to replace the display. I've got one from a Compaq Portable III that only has two bad lines on it, if you need it. (AFAIK they're the exact same displays.)

[...]

Thank you very much. That would be nice. But I am not sure if this will not end up like mine. It also starts with one than two, three... bad lines some years ago.

I think I try to repair it first and if this fails completely   I ask you again .

But first I have to repair a heirloom. A Wavetek 164 it's dead since last week 
(btw: Nice link to service manuals: https://doc.xdevs.com)

[SeanB]

Still have the Panasonic display for some reason, though the "laptop" it came from is long gone.

[CJay]

They had ISA slots in he back as well, full length IIRC.

I had one for a while that I used as anEPROM programmer station, an ALL03 if I remember or possibly a HiLo systems one.

Lugged it all the way down to London once to program some PALs for an Amiga 2000 Accelerator card.

[PA0PBZ]

an ALL03 if I remember or possibly a HiLo systems one.

ALL-03 is a HiLo 

[Uscleo]

Hello! I came across your post while doing research on restoring my Compaq Portable III - that upgrade with the ROM is neat! Would it be possible for me to buy a flashed chip off you? Would be be so great to boot off CF card each time

[PlainName]

A Toshiba orange plasma laptop is currently running my garage and has been doing so for the last 20 years (before that was a no-name laptop which died and the Tosh was the only thing to hand at the time). The application is a custom DOS program running off floppy. I hadn't thought about it, but we had a powercut not so long ago and the garage is still functioning so I guess the thing is still managing to boot off floppy despite being powered 24/7/52/20

Naturally, I've lost the source code so it would be a real bummer if this one expires

[Cyberdragon]

What do you mean you have a computer "running your garage"? What retropunk IOT mad science room of equipment do you have going on in there? Or do you mean the door opener and parking sensor?

[PlainName]

Lights. It's a three-bay affair and there is no external lighting (after sunset), so the first thing it wants to do is turn on the light for the bay that has the door opening. When you leave, the light goes off automatically, but you want it to stay on for a bit so you can see where you're going. Simple so far. Now add a simple mechanism to turn on all the lights if you're staying in there, and you don't want lights turning off if you close the doors  but are on the inside. How about if you come in one door and go out another... When you go out for real, you don't want to mess about turning off lights: just go and they turn off (after a delay for you to see, etc). Of course, there are bench lights as well which you might turn on manually but want to turn off automatically. Prior to setting this up (and there were fewer lights then) we often had to go back to the garage to turn off lights we'd left on accidentally. No, I fib, I often couldn't be arsed to go back out again

So nothing spectacular but it just makes life a lot simpler and easier. Nothing an arduino couldn't handle (they weren't around then), although the code is an engine and there is a script loaded from disk to configure it. In principle one could edit the script to change how it all works, but in practice I've not done that since about the third week after installation.