It's interesting that the first models had backlight. It was extremely useful. However, the screen mottled over time in various places and the DD wasn't the 1.44mb we have on the newer models. I do miss the backliggt though especially since you could switch it on and off.
I couldn't agree with you more! It probably wouldn't be difficult to make a version of frotz for this. Although most infocom games required 64 k... It's a pitty nobody ever took any interest in the powernote because I'm sure they could have done a lot with it!
I wish I had known in 96 that it existed. Would have been a perfect traveling note taker. My Win 95 notebook that the company gave me was a beast, and cost 10 thousand dollars with docking station...!
I had one of these and it's amazing how old technology like this brings back memories. It was a different model but the same features without the modem. The battery came with it as I recall. I never really used it to its potential and kind of regretted buying it but it was still a nice alternative for someone who just wanted the basics in a portable package for a lower price.
I still like to use these machines for writing (distraction-free, pretty much) and pick up spares from time to time on eBay. Anyhow, there are several different models and the most recent one I picked up was a PN-8500MDSe, a variant I hadn't had before. One of the built-in apps is called "Line by Line," and I couldn't figure out at first what it was for. Turns out it's an honest-to-goodness typewriter simulator. You type a line of text, hit enter, and it prints on the printer. The printer feeds the paper forward one line. Your line of text goes away on the screen. Then you do the whole thing over again. I still haven't come up with a reason anyone would want to do that.
Easy, sometimes you need to fill out forms and you can't do that with a word processor. I have used mine for that in the last. It would be better if you didn't have to type a whole line for it to type first though. (easier to make sure it's printing in the right blank.) eons back I made a program to do this on the apple //e. It was very useful.
The screen above looks like the one that was on my old 89 or 91 laptop I had. I still use my 50 MHz laptop from 94,95. I like the fact that it still functions correctly and reminds me how far computers has come.
6 MHz Processor in 1996?! No Backlight and no COLOR? 1996? I would buy this laptop just for the heck of it. I'd be walking around with a 6 MHz computer in 2015.
ComputingWorld™ Remember that this wasn't meant for the standard computing fare. Also remember that megahertz aren't everything. The Pentium 4 and MOS 6502 taught us that, from different perspectives. The Pentium 4 wasn't anywhere near as fast as the clock speed would have you believe. Meanwhile the 6502 did more with 1MHz than the Z80 family did with 3 or more MHz.
@Hacker InsideTM When this video was made, you could buy an octacore FX-9590 at 5 GHz; whereas one could also buy a, spec-wise, tremendously outdated 700 MHz single-core Raspberry Pi. So this probably wasn't all that bad in the day people were used not to have computers at all.
I had one of these. I was taking a correspondence creative writing course (wow, correspondence...1996...before I was online). I loved it. I felt like I was a professional writer with my own “laptop”...I took it everywhere and pulled it out to show off 🤣
I did too! Carry it around all the time that is. People were stunned by the instant on feature which I honestly think is missing in computers for the longest time. It truly was a nifty device!
Seems like an Ok device. I think it would have a much better system if it included the BASIC language in ROM. There would be a lot of things to do with it besides what its menu offered. I would like to know the battery life on this machine as it was when new. Btw, excellent video as I always enjoy watching them.
The battery life was about 8 hours. It was truly remarkable because most laptops started with 1.5 hrs and that decreased daily.. I agree it SHOULD have had basic. It would have been truly remarkable if it did.. Even if you had to empty the memory to load it like when you load a game. (Just in case you are still interested after 7 years when you posted the wiestion)
***** So long as the gifter got the optional battery. I was fairly happy with my parents getting me a Geobook... until I found out how much the optional battery would cost, which was beyond what I would/could spend using allowance money.
The printer support may seem limited, but that thing supports all the major page description languages, PCL4, Epson ESC/P, and IBM ProPrinter which covered about 90% of the printers made during that time period.
Actually, it was compatible with almost every printer on the market, except as he mentioned, the windows printers (because they didn't have built in fonts), all you had to do was emulate the Epson fx80 and you could always print, even from a dumb terminal. Nobody needed drivers for this. Since the fonts were built in.
Actually, the model that had the internal modem, PN-8700MDS still has the serial port. Found one for sale at a goodwill about an hour and a half away from me for $6, no power adapter, but has the optional battery. Think it's worth the drive. It's a cool little machine. Just wish it had a backlight...
Apparently this has 63kB of internal RAM, which means that if you could boot it from floppy it'd make a superb CP/M machine! Sadly, I don't see any on ebay --- I assume Brother sold at least _some_...
Man, I remember playing around in like OfficeMax with these useless things back in the day - I thought they were so cool! I gotta say this thing has all the new machines beat by having the floppy drive. *Every* goddamn PC should have a floppy and P/S2 Ports as far as I'm concerned.
Comparing the price of a brother laptop and Toshiba satellite laptop from 1996 is like comparing the prices of today's Chromebook and Alienware Laptops. Brother Laptop= Chromebook and Toshiba Satellite= Alienware.
You know what I'd love to see someone do with this? Hack a a sega dreamcast into it. Put a 7" or so TFT LCD into it and slap the guts in, solder the lot and you've got a nice little machine. Now, if only it was that easy.
I just got one from eBay to play with. I actually love the feeling of typing on it. I was thinking of doing a series of videos on writing implements, with the pros and cons of each if you want to be a novelist. (The big issue with these would be file compatibility.)
SeanFromPVD The GeoBook really interests me, but he seems to have put the geobook video on the back burner for a long time. I really want to pick one of these up eventually.
He could also do a video on one of those eee laptop things that was part of a big push to get cheap computers into Africa. Those things were super cheap and extremely under-powered even in the Netbook era. I wonder how they hold up now. I was able to figure out that the Brother PowerNotes had a converter built into their file manager that would allow for the conversion of a file into a TXT file, after it was moved from resident memory over the the floppy. The floppy is horrendously slow, especially compared to something like my Sony Mavica cameras that have a 2X speed drive! Blazing fast, I know. It practically peels the paint off the side of the thing when the power is unleashed. LMAO :) I love old tech. It's like looking at cave drawings and remembering what it was like when people had to kill things to survive. Now we just go to markets and can compose messages on our phones. Back then, they had fax machines and shit. LOL :) (I still have like 3 fax machines, so I can't make too much fun of that... and one is only a month old.)
I am surprised there aren't little WordProcessors like this around, that use the kindle eink type technology. Really low battery use that you can take anywhere. Also could be thinner and lighter and a tablet, as well as cheaper.
The e-ink tech is only low power when the screen is static. I do agree it would be interesting if you could modify the Kindles to allow for a word processor though. Don't know why nobody ever made one.
Absolute beast of a machine right there. Can't knock the venerable Zilog Z80 CPU though, they've been used for just about every imaginable application from Gameboys to embedded industrial machinery and everything inbetween. I cut my assembly language programming teeth by making my TI-83 calculator in high school do all sorts of things it was never intended to do.
@@LippdinosMaybe a newer Z80 variant, if it's pin-compatible. Z80 was used in some Ericsson mobile phones, such as Ericsson GA628. Later, around the mid-2000s, Z80 was used in the S1MP3 type of audio players. So it is really versatile.
for a cheap laptop , it has a lot of surprising things on board of its features such as a world clock, a online texting , a word processor with a couple font options and a spreadsheet. plus a floppy drive, this is very amazing for what you get for such a cheap price back then. hell , id like to have one and take it with me every where i go. what a awesome laptop.
No, it is not cheap. You are probably thinking about the $300 in today's value. Inflation calculator says that it is $544 in today's money. And what it does seems more like a toy than a computer. It should have been price a lot lower than that, something like $200 in today's money.
I remember seeing this in Staples when I was in high school. It's very similar to the Brother word processor (with daisy wheel printer built in) we had back then. It also had Tetris on a disk. Edit: I might have seen the GEOS one.... Or both... Idk. Haha
You are correct. Brother, either to save effort or out of pure intelligence made the word processors with the same base of software. So you can load your powernote disks into your word processor to print them. It was extremely useful to be able to swap files back and forth. I still use mine to have beautiful typewritten sheets. It is truly classy!
WOW. Something you might want to know about this "laptop," back in the 1990s, Brother also had a typewriter that this laptop could hook up to, I believe over serial or parallel. I had the typewriter.
Brother didn't get the memo about palmrests... I believe by 1996 laptops already had the keyboard pushed back toward the display a little. This is more of a 1990 layout.
Min 8:58 can be converted Lotus 1-2-3 WK1 files! My HP200LX Palm Top 4 MB RAM is better and smaller! Muchas gracias. Interesante reseña pues ahora comprendo mejor la influencia de HP modelos HP95 LX, HP100LX y la mejor HP200LX la cual aún hoy en dia uso con cientos de hojas de cálculo, funciones de calculadora financiera, etc. etc. en perfectas condiciones, con sólo dos baterías AA, puerto serial que me ha permitido compatibilidad en todas las versiones de Windows. etc.. etc. Saludos.
it is amazing how far we have come with technology today computers we have today are better and faster then when i was a kid computers were something else back then today in 2015 you can not even watch youtube on that brother laptop what could you do with it today nothing
I bought one of those when they came out. I think it was around $399 and included the battery. It was the best I could do at the time for portable computing and I got some use out of it but it was pretty much already obsolete and a pain to use.
***** EXACTLY. need to get into that pesky cisco 2900 series managed switch to cause some havoc? no one will ever suspect such an old clunker of a laptop! it's like the spanish inquisition-- no one EVER expects the spanish inquisition!
I seriously wonder what advantage this would have over a TRS-80 Model 100, except maybe a bigger screen (and yes, a floppy drive was available for the Model 100).
Looking forward to the GeoBook review. My parents got me one for high school, but didn't get the battery, making not very useful compared the 486 desktop we had at the time. Ended up giving it to a less-technical uncle. Had Tetris (unmemorable version) and Turnabout (Reversi/Othello clone) on the disk it came with, which you ran from a DOS command line (don't think it had an x86 chip in the GeoBook either, as I never got regular DOS games running)
vwestlife Hmm. I wonder how many DOS games/programs I tried out. Probably not many, given the lack of battery to spur me into using the thing. An overview of compatibility would be interesting if you make a video about the GeoBook. Do you have the disk it came with? I might have a copy of the disk I could image, which would give the games and the conversion tools (PC side only, IIRC) to change the formats it saved in to normal PC software formats.
Please do make a video about your GeoBook, I've seen a few videos about them and I'd like to see more, there aren't very many videos about the GeoBook on TH-cam. Thanks.
The first laptop I bought was a Satellite for around $2,000 and I remember having to make monthly payments on it through a Circuit City credit card or something. This Brother laptop is not something I recall seeing. 80 X 22 display seems strange, couldn't fit those extra 3 in. :)
I was remembering what we had at home at the time in terms of electronic amenities and thinking about it.. for the price this thing was it would have helped a lot! obviously just for school work and for various paperwork ... still it would have worked very well for me.. sad I didn't know this existed .. I wonder if this was able to not only send, but receive faxes.. if so, hell.. it was a great deal.. people don't seem to remember that Fax Machines were not that cheap.. it was one of those things that if went broken it would stay like that for eons unless it was really really needed, and I think a lot of fax machines could have fetched near the price of this thing.
oh.. that's pity.. altough thinking it a little more what did I expect? how would it print an actual image to the screen? I guess it would have required much more "juice" than what the processor is capable.. the amount of memory may have been another problem.. also maybe the screen would have not been able to represent even a low res digitized image.. who knows..
I remember back in the late 90's when my grandmother had one of those standalone word processors which I remember even back in 1997 or 98, most PCs even entry level desktop ones costed over $1,000. So I imagine if all you needed to do is type letters and speadsheets, you basically got one of those standalone word processor machines instead of a full-fledged PC.
I seem to recall Brother making a "smart" typewriter that had an LCD screen similar to this. It does look like a Brother typewriter just missing the rest of the bits. There sure was a lot of interesting stuff going on back then.
All the OS etc looks very similar to the Brother typewriter my Father bought at around the same time. Selling it recently I checked on prices in an old Argos Catalogue. The Brother typewriter, which had a high quality Daisy Wheel printer cost £250. The cheapest PC and printer package was £1100 and wouldn't have been portable. The Brother was perfectly good for writing reports for the likes of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
Looks like they were targeting the folks that were using the Tandy Model 100 Portable. The Tandy was n use by a lot of journalists at the time. But it looks pretty non-standard.
I WATCHED THIS VIDEO YEARS AGO. I WANTED ONE FOR DISTRACTION FREE WRITING. TODAY I GOT ONE BY ACCIDENT. IT IS A SHAME THAT IT USES A CENTER NEGATIVE PSU.
$300 for that in '96? (and without a battery, at that?) I guess it shows you how much the price of computers goes down over time, even without factoring in inflation. I bought a $200 laptop (HP Stream 11) in 2017, and I think it would have to be considered far better for its time than this thing.
One thing I forgot to mention in my last comment is that the Super PowerNotes I saw advertised here weren't white like yours is, they were either black or dark grey, I'm not too sure which. I don't know if there were other differences to the hardware or software or whether they were the same as this one.
man ive been watching your videos for a few hours now, and god i like em all. i looooooooove electronics of all sorts, and its very nice the way you describe every parts in details and all. Thanks a lot for you videos ! Subscribed :) I!!
3:44 Printers had *some* memory. The "winprinters" as you refer to could not process standard ASCII text if you, say, ECHOed that to LPT1: from a DOS prompt. The rest of the processing was indeed host-based. Most of the DeskJet 900-series printers still supported ASCII text, and would even print a graphical screenshot if you ran GRAPHICS.COM (no, not _that_ graphics dot com) first. Anything after that would kindly vomit on its own shoes if you send it a job like that.
+MegaBojan1993 There wasn't much of a market for second hand laptops back then. People used to hang on to them for much longer precisely cause they were expensive to begin with. A laptop was a long term investment. You couldn't afford to change them like socks the way we do today. Also cause of this, the few second hand laptops that were available weren't much cheaper than their original price. And another reason was that sh laptops weren't that outdated. Technology didn't progress as fast as today. That was a different time, friend.
+MegaBojan1993 Yes, but you gotta remember. Computers weren't that big yet. Especially not for children and teens. We had MTV, VHS cassettes, boom boxes, arcade games etc. PCs weren't yet a popular form of entertainment so it didn't really matter to us. Now that I think about it, the 90s were beautiful but weird ass years. I don;t know how old you are, but the world 20 years ago was much, much different than it is today.
Upon first look I was indifferent about it. Then you started opening it and showed the horribly rectangular screen, I was then disgusted. It looks like an imitation toy and not a laptop.
In my old school I used to go to, they had Chromebooks that had handles like a briefcase for when you close it, you pop out the handle and borrow it from a classroom and go to other classes with it. But you cannot take it home. of course. I know this video does not have anything to do with handles but the finger grips reminds me of the school chromebooks. They were like Ebooks or Education Laptops. They were donated to the school by a few hundreds I guess. I thought they were cool.
I remember seeing these at places like Dick Smith Electronics and other similar shops, I believe here in Australia it sold for something like $600 or $700 actually. In 1997 I read a review of the SPN in Electronics Australia, I think the person who reviewed it was not a bit fan of notebook computer, the review basically talked about how good it is compared to a notebook computer probably they're talking about a productivity standpoint. I'm sure the review was talking about the fact that nobody wants to use all the features of a multimedia notebook computer, and multimedia notebooks were really just starting to take off at that time, this got a pretty good review from memory. What's the odd noise I can hear faintly in the background? A strange scraping noise I hear every few seconds, is it an insect of some kind?
That's an interesting rig; it seems like they tried their best to squeeze as much functionality and compatibility as possible into a proprietary machine. Although I somewhat agree with the comments below that it seems dated, even for the time. I wonder how long it would run if you rigged a 9V battery to the battery terminals?
Aah, it's basically just a fancy typewriter. I guess it's good for someone who would only want a computer for typing up documents. It would be like someone getting a smartphone instead of a normal flip phone, if all they'll ever do with it is make phone calls :-) Do you have a bird? All throughout the video, I kept hearing what sounded like a bird squawking to the left of the camera.
I think it's more like getting a basic phone or featurephone with installable Java apps instead of a smartphone. - Think Nokia button phones with the S40 Series operating system, compared to something that ran Windows Mobile, Symbian, and then later iOS or Android.
Interesting. Amstrad sold similar machines in the UK, but they made no attempt to pretend it was a proper computer, selling a couple different models - one was all-in-one tablet-like with the screen mounted directly above the keyboard, and the other having a flip-up screen no larger than the keyboard so it hinged partway up the case - as "portable word processors", sort of like successors to their PCW line. And the flip-up screen model had a switchable backlight, even, but at about the same price as the Brother (and both had rather more memory). And those were actually kinda alright, if you considered them as what they were rather than something pretending to be an actual computer. Even though I think that was based off a Z80 instead, the interface looks rather similar, down to that world clock. Wonder if there's some original Japanese machine they were both based off or something...? Still, "32kb chunks" aren't too bad, if it can automatically swap them out to/from the floppy as you go. Streaming that much in or out would only take a couple of seconds, every few pages. Though it is a curiously small amount given that the aforementioned PCW came with 128k as its base model, more than 10 years earlier.
I used to spreadsheet the fuck out of shit with one of these. I went into my closet to see if I still had it and the thing still powered on and works just like new. Lost all my files though.
LCD screens without backlights. Whoever thought that would be a good idea should have been shot. I used to have a VTech laptop that was very similar. It was very basic, but it did have a parallel port, which I never got to use.
7:20 How in heck did a metal Fuji Film floppy disk metal protector came loose here? I used a bunch in the 90's and still have a large remnant of leftovers from 96' the 40 pack of color floppies. They are quite useless now.
![Кто звонил ЗАХАРОВОЙ на самом деле? 😁 [Пародия]](/img/n.gif)
*Correction:* The PN-8700MDS model with the built-in modem does have a serial port. The PN-8800FXB replaces it with an infrared transceiver.
@Комендант Sixto I still have it, but I'm holding out hope of acquiring the more rare color version some day.
Look at that 21:9 ultra wide display. Brother was 18 years ahead of its time!
This would be the perfect laptop for text adventures.
No backlight tho.
It's interesting that the first models had backlight. It was extremely useful. However, the screen mottled over time in various places and the DD wasn't the 1.44mb we have on the newer models. I do miss the backliggt though especially since you could switch it on and off.
I couldn't agree with you more! It probably wouldn't be difficult to make a version of frotz for this. Although most infocom games required 64 k...
It's a pitty nobody ever took any interest in the powernote because I'm sure they could have done a lot with it!
Good grief ... that thing is bloody well near perfect ... boots instantly, so simple ... very cool video, thanks!
I wish I had known in 96 that it existed. Would have been a perfect traveling note taker. My Win 95 notebook that the company gave me was a beast, and cost 10 thousand dollars with docking station...!
I had one of these and it's amazing how old technology like this brings back memories. It was a different model but the same features without the modem. The battery came with it as I recall. I never really used it to its potential and kind of regretted buying it but it was still a nice alternative for someone who just wanted the basics in a portable package for a lower price.
I still like to use these machines for writing (distraction-free, pretty much) and pick up spares from time to time on eBay. Anyhow, there are several different models and the most recent one I picked up was a PN-8500MDSe, a variant I hadn't had before. One of the built-in apps is called "Line by Line," and I couldn't figure out at first what it was for. Turns out it's an honest-to-goodness typewriter simulator. You type a line of text, hit enter, and it prints on the printer. The printer feeds the paper forward one line. Your line of text goes away on the screen. Then you do the whole thing over again. I still haven't come up with a reason anyone would want to do that.
Easy, sometimes you need to fill out forms and you can't do that with a word processor. I have used mine for that in the last. It would be better if you didn't have to type a whole line for it to type first though. (easier to make sure it's printing in the right blank.) eons back I made a program to do this on the apple //e. It was very useful.
One of my roommates had one these, but it was beige. I still have software that let you import the disk into DOS programs. Nice machine.
Wow, this looks like one of that 5 bucks kids toys laptops, looks identical hahaha
+MetalSonicodraco7342 You're right. It looks like an extremely complicated kid-toy laptop :)
MegaBojan1993 except tht this one doesnt have a toy mouse and non-backlit
+MetalSonicodraco7342 lol
The hardware is also similar, except made with more modern process and more integration.
The screen above looks like the one that was on my old 89 or 91 laptop I had. I still use my 50 MHz laptop from 94,95. I like the fact that it still functions correctly and reminds me how far computers has come.
I used to make those here in Memphis @ Brother International
Don't forget to buy the optional battery!
This could have been a little more useful if it had built-in BASIC.
or maybe a DOS-compatible system
It is a Z80, you could port CPM to it.
6 MHz Processor in 1996?! No Backlight and no COLOR? 1996?
I would buy this laptop just for the heck of it. I'd be walking around with a 6 MHz computer in 2015.
ComputingWorld™ Remember that this wasn't meant for the standard computing fare.
Also remember that megahertz aren't everything. The Pentium 4 and MOS 6502 taught us that, from different perspectives. The Pentium 4 wasn't anywhere near as fast as the clock speed would have you believe. Meanwhile the 6502 did more with 1MHz than the Z80 family did with 3 or more MHz.
Jacob Turner True.
@Hacker InsideTM When this video was made, you could buy an octacore FX-9590 at 5 GHz; whereas one could also buy a, spec-wise, tremendously outdated 700 MHz single-core Raspberry Pi. So this probably wasn't all that bad in the day people were used not to have computers at all.
This computer would come in handy when using BASIC or CP/M on my Altair 8800, using that terminal program and the serial port on that laptop.
I had one of these. I was taking a correspondence creative writing course (wow, correspondence...1996...before I was online). I loved it. I felt like I was a professional writer with my own “laptop”...I took it everywhere and pulled it out to show off 🤣
I did too! Carry it around all the time that is. People were stunned by the instant on feature which I honestly think is missing in computers for the longest time. It truly was a nifty device!
Seems like an Ok device. I think it would have a much better system if it included the BASIC language in ROM. There would be a lot of things to do with it besides what its menu offered. I would like to know the battery life on this machine as it was when new. Btw, excellent video as I always enjoy watching them.
Yeah seems great
The battery life was about 8 hours. It was truly remarkable because most laptops started with 1.5 hrs and that decreased daily.. I agree it SHOULD have had basic. It would have been truly remarkable if it did.. Even if you had to empty the memory to load it like when you load a game. (Just in case you are still interested after 7 years when you posted the wiestion)
I always felt sorry for anyone who wanted a computer for Christmas and ended up with something like this... LOL :)
*****
So long as the gifter got the optional battery. I was fairly happy with my parents getting me a Geobook... until I found out how much the optional battery would cost, which was beyond what I would/could spend using allowance money.
***** Dude, I was there, OK? These were a curiosity but weren't real computers... This was crap even in it's day. :)
***** Well, Pentium 4, Penitum M, Athlon 64 and even Athlon XP Computers are decent more than 10 years later
tomoya97 And those can and are still being used
I got a VTECH laptop...
The printer support may seem limited, but that thing supports all the major page description languages, PCL4, Epson ESC/P, and IBM ProPrinter which covered about 90% of the printers made during that time period.
Actually, it was compatible with almost every printer on the market, except as he mentioned, the windows printers (because they didn't have built in fonts), all you had to do was emulate the Epson fx80 and you could always print, even from a dumb terminal. Nobody needed drivers for this. Since the fonts were built in.
Basically a chromebook of 90's
Actually, the model that had the internal modem, PN-8700MDS still has the serial port. Found one for sale at a goodwill about an hour and a half away from me for $6, no power adapter, but has the optional battery. Think it's worth the drive. It's a cool little machine. Just wish it had a backlight...
I can't get enough of that Toshiba laptop closing sound for some reason. I love that click.
Apparently this has 63kB of internal RAM, which means that if you could boot it from floppy it'd make a superb CP/M machine!
Sadly, I don't see any on ebay --- I assume Brother sold at least _some_...
Man, I remember playing around in like OfficeMax with these useless things back in the day - I thought they were so cool! I gotta say this thing has all the new machines beat by having the floppy drive. *Every* goddamn PC should have a floppy and P/S2 Ports as far as I'm concerned.
Comparing the price of a brother laptop and Toshiba satellite laptop from 1996 is like comparing the prices of today's Chromebook and Alienware Laptops.
Brother Laptop= Chromebook and Toshiba Satellite= Alienware.
Am I the only one who finds this thing actually fairly interesting and cool?
You know what I'd love to see someone do with this? Hack a a sega dreamcast into it. Put a 7" or so TFT LCD into it and slap the guts in, solder the lot and you've got a nice little machine. Now, if only it was that easy.
I just got one from eBay to play with. I actually love the feeling of typing on it. I was thinking of doing a series of videos on writing implements, with the pros and cons of each if you want to be a novelist. (The big issue with these would be file compatibility.)
SeanFromPVD
The GeoBook really interests me, but he seems to have put the geobook video on the back burner for a long time. I really want to pick one of these up eventually.
He could also do a video on one of those eee laptop things that was part of a big push to get cheap computers into Africa. Those things were super cheap and extremely under-powered even in the Netbook era. I wonder how they hold up now.
I was able to figure out that the Brother PowerNotes had a converter built into their file manager that would allow for the conversion of a file into a TXT file, after it was moved from resident memory over the the floppy. The floppy is horrendously slow, especially compared to something like my Sony Mavica cameras that have a 2X speed drive!
Blazing fast, I know. It practically peels the paint off the side of the thing when the power is unleashed. LMAO :)
I love old tech. It's like looking at cave drawings and remembering what it was like when people had to kill things to survive. Now we just go to markets and can compose messages on our phones. Back then, they had fax machines and shit. LOL :) (I still have like 3 fax machines, so I can't make too much fun of that... and one is only a month old.)
I had one as a kid. I was spending a lot of time drawing pictures using characters on the word processor.
I am surprised there aren't little WordProcessors like this around, that use the kindle eink type technology. Really low battery use that you can take anywhere. Also could be thinner and lighter and a tablet, as well as cheaper.
The e-ink tech is only low power when the screen is static. I do agree it would be interesting if you could modify the Kindles to allow for a word processor though. Don't know why nobody ever made one.
Absolute beast of a machine right there. Can't knock the venerable Zilog Z80 CPU though, they've been used for just about every imaginable application from Gameboys to embedded industrial machinery and everything inbetween. I cut my assembly language programming teeth by making my TI-83 calculator in high school do all sorts of things it was never intended to do.
The z80 is truly remarkable! I have always wondered if it wouldn't be possible to replace the z80 in this device for a faster one. Any clue?
@@LippdinosMaybe a newer Z80 variant, if it's pin-compatible. Z80 was used in some Ericsson mobile phones, such as Ericsson GA628.
Later, around the mid-2000s, Z80 was used in the S1MP3 type of audio players.
So it is really versatile.
for a cheap laptop , it has a lot of surprising things on board of its features such as a world clock, a online texting , a word processor with a couple font options and a spreadsheet. plus a floppy drive, this is very amazing for what you get for such a cheap price back then. hell , id like to have one and take it with me every where i go. what a awesome laptop.
No, it is not cheap. You are probably thinking about the $300 in today's value. Inflation calculator says that it is $544 in today's money. And what it does seems more like a toy than a computer. It should have been price a lot lower than that, something like $200 in today's money.
i remember wanting a laptop for school around that time frame, and i recall my mom was thinking of getting me one of those things......
I remember seeing this in Staples when I was in high school.
It's very similar to the Brother word processor (with daisy wheel printer built in) we had back then. It also had Tetris on a disk.
Edit: I might have seen the GEOS one.... Or both... Idk. Haha
You are correct. Brother, either to save effort or out of pure intelligence made the word processors with the same base of software. So you can load your powernote disks into your word processor to print them. It was extremely useful to be able to swap files back and forth. I still use mine to have beautiful typewritten sheets. It is truly classy!
it kinda looks like one of those toy Vtech laptops
William P it does
this reminds me of plug and play consoles, cheap, limited functionality, and with built in software
WOW. Something you might want to know about this "laptop," back in the 1990s, Brother also had a typewriter that this laptop could hook up to, I believe over serial or parallel. I had the typewriter.
Its really amazing how technoligy has emproved!
Has your spelling improved yet?
Looks like the most high end gaming laptop or what vwestlife :P
Brother didn't get the memo about palmrests... I believe by 1996 laptops already had the keyboard pushed back toward the display a little. This is more of a 1990 layout.
Oh yeah, my mom used to have one of those Brother word processors and the demo would talk about the word processor in the first person as well ;)
The black box on the back of the Satellite below an LCD monitor with two 1/4 inch jacks looks interesting. Wonder what that is.
Min 8:58 can be converted Lotus 1-2-3 WK1 files! My HP200LX Palm Top 4 MB RAM is better and smaller! Muchas gracias. Interesante reseña pues ahora comprendo mejor la influencia de HP modelos HP95 LX, HP100LX y la mejor HP200LX la cual aún hoy en dia uso con cientos de hojas de cálculo, funciones de calculadora financiera, etc. etc. en perfectas condiciones, con sólo dos baterías AA, puerto serial que me ha permitido compatibilidad en todas las versiones de Windows. etc.. etc. Saludos.
I really like these Brother PowerNotes. Found my 8500MDS at a Goodwill for $2!
Reminds me of old vetch laptops for kids
my chromebook is $149 and it does a lot
it is amazing how far we have come with technology today computers we have today are better and faster then when i was a kid computers were something else back then today in 2015 you can not even watch youtube on that brother laptop what could you do with it today nothing
Nice! I think I may have saw this in the introduction for some episode of some reality TV show here a long time ago.
I owned one of these. Only used it for word processing, which it did fairly well.
I bought one of those when they came out. I think it was around $399 and included the battery. It was the best I could do at the time for portable computing and I got some use out of it but it was pretty much already obsolete and a pain to use.
The serial port may be able to be used with a Linux-running machine as a serial TTY.
***** New BA-4000 batteries are still easy to find -- including aftermarket NiMH ones, whereas the original Brother battery is NiCad.
***** EXACTLY. need to get into that pesky cisco 2900 series managed switch to cause some havoc? no one will ever suspect such an old clunker of a laptop! it's like the spanish inquisition-- no one EVER expects the spanish inquisition!
***** vwestlife also seems youtube changed their layout again! goput.it/9193.png just a heads up, sorry for offtopic.
***** that's more of a duh. the entire thing we're talking about is using the thing as a dummy terminal on a linux box's serial port.
I seriously wonder what advantage this would have over a TRS-80 Model 100, except maybe a bigger screen (and yes, a floppy drive was available for the Model 100).
Looking forward to the GeoBook review. My parents got me one for high school, but didn't get the battery, making not very useful compared the 486 desktop we had at the time. Ended up giving it to a less-technical uncle. Had Tetris (unmemorable version) and Turnabout (Reversi/Othello clone) on the disk it came with, which you ran from a DOS command line (don't think it had an x86 chip in the GeoBook either, as I never got regular DOS games running)
tom611 Actually the GeoBook uses an AMD Elan chip, which is an embedded version of the 386SX. It can run some DOS programs but not all.
vwestlife
Hmm. I wonder how many DOS games/programs I tried out. Probably not many, given the lack of battery to spur me into using the thing. An overview of compatibility would be interesting if you make a video about the GeoBook. Do you have the disk it came with? I might have a copy of the disk I could image, which would give the games and the conversion tools (PC side only, IIRC) to change the formats it saved in to normal PC software formats.
tom611 I don't have the disk it came with, but since it runs GEOS, various applications and games are pretty easy to find online.
Please do make a video about your GeoBook, I've seen a few videos about them and I'd like to see more, there aren't very many videos about the GeoBook on TH-cam. Thanks.
The first laptop I bought was a Satellite for around $2,000 and I remember having to make monthly payments on it through a Circuit City credit card or something. This Brother laptop is not something I recall seeing. 80 X 22 display seems strange, couldn't fit those extra 3 in. :)
We are so lucky now having our tablets and laptops which all play games and can even watch a film on when they have enough battery.
I was remembering what we had at home at the time in terms of electronic amenities and thinking about it.. for the price this thing was it would have helped a lot! obviously just for school work and for various paperwork ... still it would have worked very well for me.. sad I didn't know this existed .. I wonder if this was able to not only send, but receive faxes.. if so, hell.. it was a great deal.. people don't seem to remember that Fax Machines were not that cheap.. it was one of those things that if went broken it would stay like that for eons unless it was really really needed, and I think a lot of fax machines could have fetched near the price of this thing.
Ryoga2K It can only send faxes, not receive them.
oh.. that's pity.. altough thinking it a little more what did I expect? how would it print an actual image to the screen? I guess it would have required much more "juice" than what the processor is capable.. the amount of memory may have been another problem.. also maybe the screen would have not been able to represent even a low res digitized image.. who knows..
Ryoga2K It doesn't have nearly enough RAM to receive a fax.
I have one of these too, sitting in a closet with several other old electronics.
I love those dc connectors on old laptops! I can just connect one of my modern chargers with a changeable voltage, and I'm good to go.
So, it is basically a bulkier databank. 😂
I remember back in the late 90's when my grandmother had one of those standalone word processors which I remember even back in 1997 or 98, most PCs even entry level desktop ones costed over $1,000. So I imagine if all you needed to do is type letters and speadsheets, you basically got one of those standalone word processor machines instead of a full-fledged PC.
Cool bit of old kit
I seem to recall Brother making a "smart" typewriter that had an LCD screen similar to this. It does look like a Brother typewriter just missing the rest of the bits. There sure was a lot of interesting stuff going on back then.
All the OS etc looks very similar to the Brother typewriter my Father bought at around the same time. Selling it recently I checked on prices in an old Argos Catalogue. The Brother typewriter, which had a high quality Daisy Wheel printer cost £250. The cheapest PC and printer package was £1100 and wouldn't have been portable. The Brother was perfectly good for writing reports for the likes of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
Looks like they were targeting the folks that were using the Tandy Model 100 Portable. The Tandy was n use by a lot of journalists at the time. But it looks pretty non-standard.
i had this for school back in 1996. that optional battery was terrible
I WATCHED THIS VIDEO YEARS AGO. I WANTED ONE FOR DISTRACTION FREE WRITING. TODAY I GOT ONE BY ACCIDENT. IT IS A SHAME THAT IT USES A CENTER NEGATIVE PSU.
I'm glad its over 50$ now
$300 for that in '96? (and without a battery, at that?) I guess it shows you how much the price of computers goes down over time, even without factoring in inflation. I bought a $200 laptop (HP Stream 11) in 2017, and I think it would have to be considered far better for its time than this thing.
Action Retro sent me here.
yay! an oversized ti-83 calculator with a KEYBOARD!!!!!!!
I got a similar model...got drowned and taken away by the flood in '99. Miss that one,really.
One thing I forgot to mention in my last comment is that the Super PowerNotes I saw advertised here weren't white like yours is, they were either black or dark grey, I'm not too sure which. I don't know if there were other differences to the hardware or software or whether they were the same as this one.
Interesting video. I have never seen one of these before!
Do you still have that GeoBook? There doesn't seem to be any videos about it on TH-cam right now, so I'd love to see your video on it.
I actually kind of find your videos hard to watch. I don't know what it is, I just do. I find them much more watchable however in two-time speed.
Oh shit. I had one of these. Mine had Tetris on it, which is all I used it for
man ive been watching your videos for a few hours now, and god i like em all. i looooooooove electronics of all sorts, and its very nice the way you describe every parts in details and all. Thanks a lot for you videos ! Subscribed :) I!!
Does this machine (Super PowerNote) have a dictionary in the word processor's Tools Menu?
3:44 Printers had *some* memory. The "winprinters" as you refer to could not process standard ASCII text if you, say, ECHOed that to LPT1: from a DOS prompt. The rest of the processing was indeed host-based. Most of the DeskJet 900-series printers still supported ASCII text, and would even print a graphical screenshot if you ran GRAPHICS.COM (no, not _that_ graphics dot com) first. Anything after that would kindly vomit on its own shoes if you send it a job like that.
Regular printers that were not WinPrinters, would print a screenshot from a DOS program on pressing the PrtSc key on the keyboard.
"It's pretty slow drawing them [the menus]"... that is because it's a pretty old LCD, even by the standards of the time.
If I was into computers back in 1996, I think that I would pass on the Brother computer. I would've gotten the Toshiba instead :)
+MegaBojan1993 "Real" laptops were extremely expensive back then. I bought my first laptop in 1998 and paid $1600 for it.
spineshivers Sheesh, that is extremely expensive. Were second-hand laptops (2-3 years old) much cheaper than the new ones back in 1996?
+MegaBojan1993 There wasn't much of a market for second hand laptops back then. People used to hang on to them for much longer precisely cause they were expensive to begin with. A laptop was a long term investment. You couldn't afford to change them like socks the way we do today. Also cause of this, the few second hand laptops that were available weren't much cheaper than their original price. And another reason was that sh laptops weren't that outdated. Technology didn't progress as fast as today. That was a different time, friend.
spineshivers Sounds like those times were terrible ones if you wanted to become a laptop owner.
+MegaBojan1993 Yes, but you gotta remember. Computers weren't that big yet. Especially not for children and teens. We had MTV, VHS cassettes, boom boxes, arcade games etc. PCs weren't yet a popular form of entertainment so it didn't really matter to us. Now that I think about it, the 90s were beautiful but weird ass years. I don;t know how old you are, but the world 20 years ago was much, much different than it is today.
Why was the screen so small???
was the 300 adjusted to inflation
Upon first look I was indifferent about it. Then you started opening it and showed the horribly rectangular screen, I was then disgusted. It looks like an imitation toy and not a laptop.
That's all Brother ever made, except for the P-Touch.
And printers, fax machines, etc
In my old school I used to go to, they had Chromebooks that had handles like a briefcase for when you close it, you pop out the handle and borrow it from a classroom and go to other classes with it. But you cannot take it home. of course.
I know this video does not have anything to do with handles but the finger grips reminds me of the school chromebooks.
They were like Ebooks or Education Laptops. They were donated to the school by a few hundreds I guess. I thought they were cool.
I have a chromebook of myself. It is a white Acer CB3-111 from 2015. I take it everywhere I go and write on my word processor.
I remember seeing these at places like Dick Smith Electronics and other similar shops, I believe here in Australia it sold for something like $600 or $700 actually. In 1997 I read a review of the SPN in Electronics Australia, I think the person who reviewed it was not a bit fan of notebook computer, the review basically talked about how good it is compared to a notebook computer probably they're talking about a productivity standpoint. I'm sure the review was talking about the fact that nobody wants to use all the features of a multimedia notebook computer, and multimedia notebooks were really just starting to take off at that time, this got a pretty good review from memory.
What's the odd noise I can hear faintly in the background? A strange scraping noise I hear every few seconds, is it an insect of some kind?
Cicada insects is the sound you hear. Annoying, annoying things that can get quite loud.
Hitachi made processors and WD made graphics processors...
is anyone seeing a trend here?
+Devin Hepburn Yeah, HGST
now we need companies like sister mother and father, btw who's brother was it?
Then, companies named Brother, Sister, Mother, and Father would all merge under the banner of Weyland-Yutani : >
just curious what that noise in the background is.
Crickets outside.
I wish someone would port SymbOS or CP/M for it
Interesting video thanks for sharing. Hope you make that video of the Brother GeoBook one day, that would be nice.
That's an interesting rig; it seems like they tried their best to squeeze as much functionality and compatibility as possible into a proprietary machine. Although I somewhat agree with the comments below that it seems dated, even for the time.
I wonder how long it would run if you rigged a 9V battery to the battery terminals?
Aah, it's basically just a fancy typewriter. I guess it's good for someone who would only want a computer for typing up documents. It would be like someone getting a smartphone instead of a normal flip phone, if all they'll ever do with it is make phone calls :-)
Do you have a bird? All throughout the video, I kept hearing what sounded like a bird squawking to the left of the camera.
Crickets. :-)
You sir, need a Whisper 2000. Whisper 2000 Super Sensitive Sound Modulator test
I think it's more like getting a basic phone or featurephone with installable Java apps instead of a smartphone. - Think Nokia button phones with the S40 Series operating system, compared to something that ran Windows Mobile, Symbian, and then later iOS or Android.
It's cool!
BUT...can it run Doom?
Interesting. Amstrad sold similar machines in the UK, but they made no attempt to pretend it was a proper computer, selling a couple different models - one was all-in-one tablet-like with the screen mounted directly above the keyboard, and the other having a flip-up screen no larger than the keyboard so it hinged partway up the case - as "portable word processors", sort of like successors to their PCW line. And the flip-up screen model had a switchable backlight, even, but at about the same price as the Brother (and both had rather more memory). And those were actually kinda alright, if you considered them as what they were rather than something pretending to be an actual computer.
Even though I think that was based off a Z80 instead, the interface looks rather similar, down to that world clock. Wonder if there's some original Japanese machine they were both based off or something...?
Still, "32kb chunks" aren't too bad, if it can automatically swap them out to/from the floppy as you go. Streaming that much in or out would only take a couple of seconds, every few pages. Though it is a curiously small amount given that the aforementioned PCW came with 128k as its base model, more than 10 years earlier.
I used to spreadsheet the fuck out of shit with one of these. I went into my closet to see if I still had it and the thing still powered on and works just like new. Lost all my files though.
LCD screens without backlights. Whoever thought that would be a good idea should have been shot.
I used to have a VTech laptop that was very similar. It was very basic, but it did have a parallel port, which I never got to use.
Can you set it up to an external, color monitor?
No, there is no video output.
do I hear lotr soundtrack?
I would like to use this as a dumb terminal for linux
7:20 How in heck did a metal Fuji Film floppy disk metal protector came loose here? I used a bunch in the 90's and still have a large remnant of leftovers from 96' the 40 pack of color floppies. They are quite useless now.