Data General One Model 2T

[@thereallantesh]

I think the most fascinating thing about this PC is the fact that it uses a coin cell battery for the BIOS memory, and it is accessible from the exterior of the machine. I didn't know anything that old used a coin cell.

[@pc-sound-legacy]

This is very nice! No leaking and soldered barrel battery, no need to disassemble the whole unit just to change the cell.

[@catriona_drummond]

Hey, really was great to see your face in the DOScember announcement video. Also happy for you to take part to have at least one participant who actually likes PCs. :D Nifty little machine, this one.

[@Bewefau]

ha ha none of them like PC's? And yeah that kid seemed way out of place. You had all those other guy's who hated Dos or loved it. and he was like... what is dos -.-

[@AndrewTubbiolo]

What a well thought out laptop. For terminal mode, you indeed DO have such a system to hook it up to. Well, you likely do. Any linux system can serve a terminal over any rs-232 port, like say a USB to Serial converter, via a getty you'd set up. You could totally even do it from a Raspberry Pi even. ANY Linux system. But I'm sure that little baby of yours is really pining for a DG-Nova to talk to.

[@catriona_drummond]

I have heard rumours that there is an entirely waterproof version of this. The Data Admiral... :P

[@HrLBolle]

Free cookies for you😎

[@RetroTechChris]

This comment gets a thumbs up for sure! Well done :)

[@detaart]

11 inch gameboy screen. That's what i'm talking about!

[@easycompzeelandold2521]

Dat is zeker wel het kersje op jouw KZbin naam.

[@tomservo5007]

13:42, the mind blowing part was able to make changes to the data and have the other cells in the spreadsheet update on the fly. That was a game changer in the world of paper spreadsheets

[@orangeActiondotcom]

Appreciate the quick demonstration of some of the applications, feels like a lot of people skip right over these and go straight for the games. I was a child when this stuff was in use so I recognize the names from BBS file bases and magazines, but I never saw any of it in action. I can start a lot of this stuff up but I don't always know what to do with it, so seeing a quick dBASE III demo was an eye opener.

[@chrismisc7856]

Great video! I own a similar machine, but a Zenith model. I actually acquired it not too long ago and have yet to reveal all the specs, however, it does have 2x 720KB drives and no fixed disk like yours.

[@RetroSpector78]

Also have a zenith (with 720kb disk abd hard drive !). Also planning a video on that one ... at some point :)

[@chrismisc7856]

@@RetroSpector78 Great! Love the videos! Keep it up!

[@cbly]

My dad had the earlier version you showed except his didn't use a battery. I brought it to a library to do a book report for school and asked where I could plug it in. Nobody working there understood why I wanted to do such a thing, the idea of a portable computer was alien to them. I began to draw a crowd while I was setting it up, a 10 year old kid with some futuristic gadget.

[@modernandretrogaming]

Very good machine, thanks for showing Blockout, I played so many years ago that game at my AMD 286.

[@giz644.]

Wow cool... Ive never seen a external Keyboard Interface like that before. How interesting. Thank you for sharing. Lov DOScember. This thing must have weight a ton.

[@86smoke]

Hell, this thing is in REALLY good shape! Too bad there are none of those in my vicinity. Only thing to add is that HDD you mentioned, but it might be impossible to find. Also, I'm glad that you put DOScember playlist in a description, I had not got a clue of most of channels involved.

[@LaurentLaborde]

thank you for the zoom on the power supply, it's a lifesaver. trying to repair one here

[@GutnarmEVE]

just got massive flashbacks when hearing the grand prix circuit car selection menu music :-O also, love the 'boss key' many a game used to feature back then (as shown with Tetris, towards the end of your video). things got a bit more obvious over the years though (thinking Sierra games' pixelated black-on-white spreadsheets).

[@maedero05]

Business machine, all there to say, dos based office applications. Screen good for simple arcade games, for a office worker on the move a delighght, only a HD and batery pack would help avoid the diskette loading issue and enhance the performance. That there 3.5 inch and 2032 CMOS batery is a plus aswell !

[@RetroSpector78]

Yeah .... too bad hard drive will probably be impossible to find.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

That would be a “passive-matrix” screen. That means instead of an individual driver transistor under every pixel and being able to switch it directly, there was a row and a column of drivers along edges of the screen, operating sequentially to scan across the pixels. This made for slower updates.

[@pc-sound-legacy]

For a passive matrix display it's fast, isn't it? These passive color displays of the 486gen laptops are slower in my memories.

[@andrewlittleboy8532]

Keyboard is gorgeous. Electro-luminescence backlights can make some noise.

[@SenileOtaku]

I remember when the DG-One first came out, I **SO** wanted one. Many years later I found one for $25 at a hamfest. So yes, I did eventually have one, just years beyond it's time. Sold it 2 or 3 years ago.

[@azurabayta133]

Ooh, this is a really nice overview of this machine! I've got an original DG One, but the poor boy doesn't work due to a broken flatflex and a wonky PSU. It's nice to see another one of the same line up and running. :)

[@okona1up]

Ahh, correct CTRL key location.

[@TheDc1984dc]

When he said it came from France it reminded me of Coneheads. "France. We come from France." Lol

[@senilyDeluxe]

Used a Data General One at a retrocomputing festival once or twice. I believe it was the first version. I just plopped my Blockout disk in and the game just ran fine. But the screen had a contrast of like 2:1 so it was barely readable even at the best lighting and indoors you had trouble telling if the screen was blank or not. (the LCD background also was kind of a Quartz LCD watch silver instead of this yellow here - and no backlight - btw I have a GRiD 1550sx with an EL backlight and that makes a whining noise too) The LCD is kind of a waste because there's a large area at the top and bottom where nothing is displayed /ever/. At least it has a high resolution font. Is there no one gabbering over the 6 hour battery life? In 1984? Grand Prix Circuit on DOS was, together with Blockout and Crystal Caves were the games I grew up with. Then I found a Commodore 64 in the dump. And a friend found a shoebox full of floppy disks. One had Grand Prix Circuit on it. The difference in sound literally blew me away... What's gonna be next month? Atari Jaguary?

[@ms-dosman7722]

I always find these mid 80s machines very interesting. Before there was any agreed upon standard and everyone was making their own connectors. From a retro perspective these are a nightmare if you like to do upgrades, though. Good luck finding any of those original expansion cards.

[@JGHDVCFGT]

I had one of these back in the day, the 2T model has a backlight. IIRC you press CMD + to turn it on.

[@terminaljunk]

Remember "Check IT" from back in the day and running it on stuff like K6-2 450mhz just what kind of bonkers numbers it would come up with. Was also quite a few decent shareware options back them.

[@brianellison8744]

A fair number of earlier IBM clones had the Control key placed there, as there were a great many competing keyboard layout standards at the time.

[@peternewson2275]

The computer is from the 80's... I wonder how many times that battery compartment was used as the coke drawer.

[@RetroTechChris]

Wow, this machine has a pretty impressive amount of built-in diagnostic software! That display is surprisingly clear for what it is. Oh... and dBase... as recently as today I was working on a utility to load iCal invites into a dBase file to then be used by an MS-DOS calendaring program :-)

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

8:57 You could use a serial-USB cable to connect it to a Linux system. Should be able to manually launch getty on that, and there’s your serial login.

[@zoomosis]

I was thinking that too. Though the terminal it emulates might not be VT100 compatible.

[@greatquux]

I’d love to have something like this that I hook up to a little Pi and just do text mode links web browsing!

[@jirkazima1126]

I hoped that you would talk about the display that clearly has higher resolution than it is used in the default CGA modes. I assume that the CheckIt is wrong about the video memory size and there is a special graphics mode that can use the whole LCD area.

[@chriswatson2407]

I love the 'escape from trouble' option.

[@Bewefau]

That would be cool to have, but I'd really try to figure out how to put another screen on it. I mean with smaller daughter boards I think you can figure out how to update the screen.

[@griftereck]

those early laptops are such handsome beasts.

[@BlackEpyon]

My Tandy 1100FD has as similar display. The thing that makes gaming a bit different, besides the refresh rate, is that the screen is inverted.

[@JenniferinIllinois]

dBase III - now that's some serious old school databasing. Hehehe...

[@Firthy2002]

2 floppy drives was pretty cool. Since the slot underneath the second floppy drive was for the optional modem I am curious about where a hard drive would go. Unless it was like a hard card and took up both of the rear expansion slots?

[@DolganoFF]

Hard drive models had only one floppy

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Data General was a maker of minicomputers from the 1970s or so. They were founded by some people who left the grand-daddy of minicomputer makers, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). As this whole newfangled “PC” thing (and particularly, Microsoft-compatible PCs) became a bigger share of the market, most of the existing computer makers tried to get into the market. I don’t recall DG making any desktop-machines: I think the “One” laptop range was their only product family in this area. Ah, according to Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General , they did bring out an odd family of “Desktop Generation” hybrid machines, which didn’t do well, it seemed. So then they tried doing Unix servers built around Motorola 88000 CPUs. So when Motorola gave up on those, that was the end of that.

[@20windfisch11]

The proprietary expansion port, I think, should have all the signals of 8-bit ISA so if a pinout exists, one could hack up an XT-CF for that machine.

[@Flamelily-IT]

Oh I remember what we called the "Boss button" in some games. Press it to hide the game. Genius 😂

[@CommodoreFan64]

indeed, these days in Manjaro Linux I just hit ctrl, alt, and up/down arrow keys to switch between my work spaces 😆

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

CTRL-F1 ... CTRL-F6 on my Debian+KDE setup. (Yes, I have 6 workspaces. And that’s not counting “activities” ...)

[@CommodoreFan64]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I use Manjaro MATE as I like a simple rolling release model, and depending on system I have 2 - 3 workspaces all stacked vertical.

[@LBXComputers]

First time I’ve got to watch one of your videos literally as you posted it :)

[@ShayBlez]

that logo for doscember is really cool

Nice note!

[@naps1saps]

I have one of these not sure what model but it's mounted in a suitcase with an HP printer.

[@pc-sound-legacy]

The screen isn't that bad! I have seen worse / slower color STN screens. Like the green, kind of gameboy-style:-) 6-8 hours battery-time is great, too. A fully equipped model of this surely was quite expensive back then!

[@simontay4851]

But can it run Doom? For sound, you could use a Parallel port Adlib sound card.

[@Raphipod]

Ooh, look at that AZERTY keyboard. Haven’t seen those in a while...

[@SkynetMedia1]

Never mind the placement of the arrow keys, the normal keys are just... screwed up .... 😂

[@dykodesigns]

The font on the display is very unusual. It looks a bit different to the standard font, I wonder if they used a custom rom font. The bios also seems non standard (no AMI, Award or Phoenix).

[@Bewefau]

Did IBM use any of those?

[@greatquux]

I like it

[@HrLBolle]

Arrow keys : commodore says hello

[@pennyandrews3292]

I was reading a Mandela Effect subreddit and apparently someone out there doesn't believe that something like the Seiko TV watch was possible with 1983 technology, and I think I just blew their mind by showing them the Data General One from 1984. Basically everyone is shocked and none of them remember seeing monochrome LCD displays with individually addressable pixels like this until 1987 at the earliest, saying they'd never seen a device like that before the original Game Boy and the TI-81, which are from 1989 and 1990 respectively. They're wondering why anyone would have purchased a Sony Watchman instead of the Seiko TV Watch if that was available... is it really that hard to believe people weren't enthusiastic about blurry, pea-green LCDs that didn't have backlights?

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

14:45 But dBASE was not relational, though. Relations and joins were a key part of the theory of databases from way back, but they were considered too much for the early PCs to handle. Or too advanced for users to grasp. Or something.

[@IkarusKommt]

DBase definitely is (and was) relational.

[@pvc988]

16:30 Flight of the Bumblebee

[@TrustNo1sz]

Hi Dave... Great one! I, myself, am trying to bring back a DOS machine, It is a Compaq SLT/286 laptop that I acquired last year. I got it back working, replaced the Dallas with a CR2032. But the Hard Drive isn´t working. Already tried an IDE to CF 32MB and an IDE to SD 16MB wit no luck at all... I just got a 32MB DOM and will give it a try very soon. But increasing the memory is even a harder challenge once this machine has a very different proprietary RAM slot... Does the 2T have an IDE or some sort of HD interface? If so, are you thinking to add one to it?

[@RetroSpector78]

Not really sure what kind of interface it is. Probably xt-ide or perhaps mfm. Would beed to check. But finding a compatible drive will be very difficult.

[@CommodoreFan64]

it's a giant Gameboy with a French keyboard lol

[@CheshireNoir]

Any plans to upgrade it? Can you even get the expansions? What about modern remakes?

[@rayproductionsbackupchanne3862]

I love the look of this thing damn

[@cliffshockley4406]

If an XT class computer had a coin cell CMOS battery, why did later brands/models use those awful soldered on barrel batteries?

[@ngraykam]

I also have a Data General One Model 2T. Could you tell where can I download some applications for it, such as Wordstar, chess game, etc?

[@IkarusKommt]

What a weird proprietary Belgian keyboard. Does it have an OEM-specific driver?

[@Doellimann]

What was the name of this F1 game? I can remember it from back in the days...

[@fnglert]

Could you replace the LCD panel with a better one?

[@jazbell7]

I didn't know that Data General even made laptops. It's neat but more like "luggable" rather than portable.

[@barthonhoff5547]

Me neither. Worked several years with a DG micro 1000

[@Bewefau]

show us how to update to a newer screen? :D

[@Offsettttt]

Oh wow! What is the name of that racing game?? I'm pretty sure I played it in the 90's when I was a kid!

[@samhoward8909]

Is the modem you can put in it on an expansion card and what software can you use with the modem?

[@Mountainmonths]

those arrow keys are a deal breaker

[@RetroSpector78]

I know right ???

[@MisterRorschach90]

I want to see the most powerful dos based computer ever built. I’m talking like a binned 5950x or 3990x with a small amount of insanely fast memory, and a 3090 or rtx a6000. Oh and don’t forget raid 0 wd black gen 4 2tb drives. I know it’s stupid but since none of us can actually buy that hardware you guys might as well entertain us.

[@RetroSpector78]

Actually had to google all these part numbers to see what they were :) that’s how much I know about modern PCs (I only have a macbook pro and a windows 10 ultrabook) all my other stuff is < 2000 :)

[@madson-web]

Lovely piece

[@carlosaguirre7499]

I got one but not the charger

[@rachidtessoudali9337]

Is there serial terminal

[@tamphex]

Patrick Bateman definitely owned one of these.

[@Jkauppa]

try doing a modern hardware version of this

[@Jkauppa]

not a laptop, but a thicktop

[@HrLBolle]

Tech tangents has the cupboard version

[@RuruFIN]

Never been this early, let's watch :)

[@dimkir100]

#DOScember that’s hilarious hashtag !!!!

[@opraiderman904]

I have the original setup, complete as well.

[@worroSfOretsevraH]

More old linux stuff would be welcome.

[@thepirategamerboy12]

It's a shame that it doesn't support Hercules. Do any monochrome laptops have that? A number of Asian DOS PC games like Korean Dungeon Boy look really good in it and look much worse in CGA.

[@RetroSpector78]

You can set it to monochrome in the system settings. Would need to check if this puts it in hercules mode.

[@jesdadotcom]

Shift+2 launches Internet Explorer

[@0326Hambone]

Kinda looks like the Cardiff Giant

[@robertwielewicki1249]

Nice one

[@Bewefau]

I wish i could do half the stuff you can do I'm to dumb >

[@stevelalancette6988]

The famous AZERTY french keyboard... Even in Canada, we don't want that. I'm not sure if it's more 'efficient' than our QWERTY french canadian keyboard for french writing. Probably not.

[@jurviz]

you should put linux on some machine so you can test this as a terminal

[@jurviz]

come to think of it, didn't you just make a video on emulating dos on old linux? why can't you just use that system as a host for a serial terminal?

[@conradlarsen3451]

Interesting portable

[@patprop74]

not saying this is a bad video or anything, I am seeing a pattern with all these C:\ember video's, none of you are really getting into Dos itself and the many tools and functions and programs for it, you are all basically showing older computer that used dos as an OS. So far not one of you has even gotten into Changing the colour of the dos text itself, or Dosshell ........

[@mccrh7737]

That would make the most epic sleeper compy ;) Replace a floppy with a card reader and the other with a UBB to Floppy 1.44mb. Toss in a mini PC and load DOSBOX :)

[@nneeerrrd]

Never do that

[@mccrh7737]

@@nneeerrrd LMFAO ;)

[@StillCloser]

This DOScember is just pathetic...

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Feel free to cancel your subscription for a full refund.

[@80sCompaqPC]

StillCloser How so?