Thank you for watching! Did you own this or another rugged computer / laptop? What did you have and did it survive the punishment you threw at it? I'd love to hear your stories. Neil - RMC
Howdy Neil! While it wasn't designed as one, I had a Thinkpad T42 for the end of my school/start of my college years. I dropped it, spilled things on it, scuffed it, bag got knocked off tables, the usual. It simply didn't care. Belligerent to the end, it continued to work despite all the punishment until someone broke the screen by knocking it off a table when it wasn't in a laptop bag. Replaced the screen really easily and it was back in the game!
I collect & restore & document Husky machines. Love them. I have a whole serise of videos on my channel covering them. I have: 1. DVW Microelectronics Husky 2. Husky Hunter 3. Husky Hunter 2 4. Husky Hawk 5. Husky Hunter 16 6. Husky hunter 16/80 7. Husky FS2 8. Husky FS3 9. Husky MP2500 I have multiple of these machines, if you need any info ROM dumps on them let me know. Used one of my Husky Hunter in uni to lean coding. Converted the C# to BASIC to help understand how to code. Was fun & noone understood my method. I also have a manul for the Husky Hunter.
I don't Know if this Counts or not but i have a Panasonic toughbook cf-28 Running Windows 98se! My go to Travel Laptop For Windows Gaming as i cannot Find a Dos Sound Driver! :-)
Great Video as Usual Neil! Very Informative! Could i Possibly have the Name to the Liquid Drum and Bass Tune you use During the Unscrewing Montage? Legend!
The fact that the directory listing on the PCMCIA card takes that long the first time is actually a quirk of MSDOS, in that it goes through the FAT to determine the amount of free bytes. Paired with the fact that 2GB is quite a lot of storage for a computer in this era, this takes quite a bit of time on the first invocation. DOS then remembers this, so the subsequent calls are instant.
Amiga Retro Time ...and then you will have 300k free memory left. :-D But seriously, one could probably recover a rather big lump by using EMM386 and activating UMBs. Then try and load the PCMCIA driver into upper memory, if possible. Or install QEMM386... it works wonders and can even use extended memory for DOS, freeing up most of conventional memory.
I have a 486sx 25mhz version of this without the co-pro. On seeing your video I got it out and had a look. I do not have a psu and the handle and pen are missing, but I have box and manual. It would not boot, no prompt so I Paw-CTRL-PWR for 5 seconds, it resets the Husky and up she popped - I look forward to trying out some of your tips on this now, maybe getting something running on it - Oh as a bonus I found a 20MB PCMCIA flash card inside, can't wait to see what's on that! The internal flash drive also says DOS 1.3 on it!!! Thanks for a great video
Just to update - The util /r and util /c commands came in very useful and I have a full DOS environ. It is actually 6.22 with 1mb total mem. The PCMCIA card had a copy of FastMap700 v1 it looks like a gps logger program - last entry was Oct 1999, so guess this is what it was used for. Also, my screen looks the same as yours, nothing around the edge. The manual talks about removing the plexiglass front with a fingernail or knife and does not mention any type of seal. So I guess this is how it is from factory? So - thanks to your help Neil, I got it all working - now, wheres wolfstein???
I remember using a few of the Husky devices for housing stock condition surveys; they got quite heavy after a full day carrying one but they were easy to use and were definitely sturdy. I'm not convinced about the battery life claim though and seem to remember having to plug it into the cigarette lighter socket between surveys.
At least the battery life isn't as short as my LG Series 900 laptop PC: the factory specs is 15 minutes on a full charge! The reason for that is that it has a 19" wide screen display and a 3.5" HDD. Not SSD, a HDD.
part of the battery life would be dependent on how active you are between charges, if you're pretty busy inputting data during that period of working between charges the inflated best case scenarios will always be significantly more then real world use.
i had one along with a NEC mobile phone and i had TEN batteries for the phone that were either in my pockets or on charge (i seriously carried four around just in case i had three phone calls of three minutes to make !!) and when i reached site i would rush to find a socket to charge my husky BUT who else did anything like it at the time and what was their battery life ?? everything was shit until Nokia . .my Nokia 3130 is still charged from 1998 and has lost only one bar !!!
Yeesh, huge props to 'Mike' at handheldsystems.com because there was going to be _no_ way you would've figured out that boot option/recovery process otherwise. The only mention of the process I was able to find is in a manual for a later model (Husky MP2500) ...which I only found by looking for the whole 'YKSUH' thing in the first place. That being said, the manual for that might also be really useful for the FC486: citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;?doi=10.1.1.362.9514&rep=rep1&type=pdf or Google for "HUSKY MP2500" "System Developer's Guide"
Recently got a hold of one of these myself. Unfortunately no AC adapter, and the battery is beyond dead. Any idea what the pinout/power requirements for this device is? I'm thinking I might be able to make my own adapter.
@@mrpetit2 yes! Like asking them to talk about an old friend. Happened when I was asked to support an eee 701 in 2009 after I left tech support...not quite the same vintage, but still left me with a warm feeling.
22:35 that delay is normal. My IBM PC does the same thing with its 20MB C: drive. It has to calculate the free space and after that it just keeps track of changes.
That network connector is a LEMO connector, very nice but very expensive connectors. The small 4 pin connectors for my Trantec wireless systems are ~£20 each.
We had one of those back in the day. Used it at a convention for car dealers and workshops around the time vehicle inspection (MOT) was introduced here in Norway. Our software was nowhere near finished but we managed to show a running mockup. Dropping the machine on the concrete floor drew a lot of attention.
A Husky and an installation of ArcPAD, oh those were the days. Rugged devices really were rugged, tough and built to withstand most things. Nice bit of Retro Neil, thank you.
Fantastic. I would love to get one of these. I noticed 'WIN' written on the label on that disk module, and thought that must be Windows. The Pen version was surprise, but of course makes sense, and I'd forgotten about that version. I was thinking batteries in the pen.
I want an iPad case/keyboard version of this. Such an utterly practical design. No hinges to break or let dust in. Ports all well protected at one end and the rest is sealed. The handle/stand/cover for the exposed ports is ingenious.
Good idea, though a modern version would need to be heavy duty plastic instead of cast Magnesium for the case. Firstly, the an injection mold of that complexity would cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars, but, more importantly, it's VERY hard to find anyone who does Magnesium castings outside of China these days. Explosion hazard. That said, because of the size of a Pi compared to the 486 board, you could basically make the case nearly one solid chunk of plastic for even more rigidity.
@@elHosed Actually the metal case doubled as a heat sink. Husky was bought by Itronix, which, in turn was bought by General dynamics. It should be bootable from a pcmcia bf card. adaptor , As I recall, it's limited to a cf card of less than 4M
Husky was bought by Itronix, A US manufacturer of ultra-rugged laptops. Itronix was, in turn bought by General Dynamics (Makers of the HMV - Hummer - military SUV.). I owned an Itronix XC-6250 "Cross Country" laptop - a 386 compatible with similar construction features plus a additional features like Ardis WAN, glow in the dark keyboard, and in original condition was waterproof to twenty feet deep submersion. The XC-6250 was also know, as the Indestructible Laptop after one was run over in a parking-lot mishap that damaged the parking lot pavement but left the computer fully functional with only a few scuff marks on the case On the back of the unit, there are 4 contacts these were used with a vehicle docking station. the contacts use capacative isolation.
The screen is quite special as there is a gel pad between the glass and screen to shock absorb any impact. They used to drop them out the first floor window to demonstrate the bouncibility.
Another great video! After seeing MS-DOS and Windows running on a battery-powered machine with restrained hardware I am even more happy that modern embedded devices with an operating system are nowadays dominated by open source and Linux :)
It looks awkward on the table, but it's designed to be gripped firmly with both hands as you smash someone's skull in "Decompilation or disassembly prohibited" Nice try.
I was involved in the development of several rail track side applications which used these and other Husky models. The model you have is a special with the network port. WPI Husky became Itronix. Itronix then General Dynamics. The Husky sales guys trick was to drive a vehicle over the computer and show no damage.
WOW , the firm i worked for through the mid eighties to late nineties was a cutting edge building controls firm and they issued me one of these !!! haven't seen one for ever !!! it was brilliant and every lap top or pad i have been issued since is trash in comparison simply because this was so out there and nothing like it to sling on the bar in the pub along with my transportable phone made me "mr hitech it "
4 ปีที่แล้ว +1
Lovely rugged 486 system. Must be nice for strategy and board games.
I used these as an Advanced train engineer for the London underGround Central line trains. They were used with Dos based software for configuring the multiple Modules placed around all the Cars " Carragies" that where the interface between the train computer and all the various sensors for brakes, ATO,ATP,Doors Lights emergemcy alarms and many other essential safety and operational functions within each Car This was in the Mid 1990's when i was working on them based out of Ruislip Depot. the network port was used via a custom cable. I rember the screens being both the black,grey as shown in this Video, as well as some orange coloured ones which where much easier to read in broad sunlight. They had a Soft case with a thick strap for carrying ( we often would end up walking miles ) around the huge Depot to various trains to diagnose systems on a train that may have had a fault. I had only ever seen these at work there and wondered about their origin so thanks for sharing this.
Oh I could have done with this when I was working with the Department of the Environment in the wilds of Scotland trying to get data from various sensors in river catchments. Tough? Waterproof? Just two things that the Amstrad PPC512 I had to lug up and down mountains most definitely was not. What an utterly wretched machine to try and get working in near zero temperatures and driving rain and hail... If Neil is feeling especially masochistic, perhaps he can try firing up one of those horrible machines,
Great video, Neil. I always like seeing these unique machines. Also, my family had a copy of Ford Simulator many years ago - I recognized it from the intro "music" without looking! Thanks for bringing back some fond memories - cheers!
I like the form factor and the ruggedness of the case. I am sure their is a market out their for a case like this to be filed with whatever SBC people have in mind. A vary nice video all the way around.
Panasonic make them. Dell makes one competing against the Panasonics . However, they are priced for industry rather than the home user. I regularly use a Panasonic CF20 but was shocked when I saw the price www.ebuyer.com/884927-panasonic-toughbook-20-cf-20-mk2-10-core-i5-256gb-ssd-win10-pro-cf-20ev001te?mkwid=s_dc&pcrid=51482417339&pkw=&pmt=&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIxeObnezE6gIViLTtCh0xMAN2EAQYASABEgIxN_D_BwE
I love the LEMO connector BNC adapter. I am using similar ones to connect my instrumentation hardware. They are expensive but still a solid bit of kit.
Wolfenstein 3D and motion sickness is actually a thing, i remember getting nausea when playing that game. I also get motion sickness when playing some sequences of Half Life 2, especially when driving the buggy and the hovercraft.
My brother had one of those! He was a surveyor at the time, and used one on building sites. When he left the company, they allowed him to keep it! He offered it to me when I was a student as a techy curiosity, and I said no, thinking it was some specialist device and not a computer per se......I wish I'd said yes now! He had the 16mb upgrade, apparently it really was a bit chuggy without it.
I've owned some seriously tough Dell Latitude XFR laptops, this thing really reminds me of them. What I like about them is the fact you can cram a lot of high end hardware in one and it will be practically invincible given the only true drawbacks being a tank and screen quality isn't XPS like for sure. It's price you pay for a tough road warrior. Plus most engineers don't care about how nice a screen looks when it comes to just getting the work done..
You can just see one of these being used to log maintainance issues on a Challenger tank - just before it gets thrown at the guys who broke it! For fixing the pen I would try a trick I've seen on Jan Beta's channel mixing superglue and baking soda to create a substance you can build up on a surface that becomes somthing like plastic.
I used something like that in the late 90s. Same looking pen and screen. The issue we ran into was sunlight. You brought it out in the sun (where I used to work a lot in) the screen would go black and would take a good couple minutes to come back to be readable again.
what a thing of beauty! you should check freedos drivers to see there's a smaller reopacement for the pcmcia driver. and memory managers like dosmax that lets you load more stuff in the higher chunks of memory
The story of the British electronics industry. Where Philips designed and made the first CD player and Teletext chips is now a Builders Merchant. the building shown here was demolished to build it www.dailyecho.co.uk/business/864455.philips-sell-off-spells-uncertainty-for-350-workers/
Many years ago we had cards that you could load up with sticks of RAM and use them a bit like a modern SSD. They were very fast, the place I saw them was using them for data logging where presumably they needed the speed... this was early early 90s. If I remember right they had a battery on the card so the data wasn't lost as well. Obviously too expensive back then for home users though, RAM was pricey.
Weren't those called DoM, Disk on Module back then? Often times little PCBs with flash storage with a right angle 40 pin IDE connector (or proprietary for smaller footprint) to directly plug into system boards?
I did some investigating, and what i can see on there, is a BIOS flash chip, a 128KB second flash chip, and two mask ROM chips, probably 4MB+2MB or 4MB+4MB in capacity to store Windows installation. Mask ROM is the same - and also similar capacity - as would be found in a console game cartridge of the time. None of those are writeable in normal use, so i don't think calling them an SSD is even close to justified. The installation probably happens to a RAMDisk in computer's main RAM when no external PCMCIA storage is used. Since it's only for DOS and Windows 3.1, the RAMDisk emulation was feasible in BIOS as int13h handler and similarly the amount of RAM visible to DOS and Windows 3.1 can be limited by BIOS so it doesn't go trampling over the RAMDisk.
Anyone remember toes short lived projector computers that would be put on toes old school projectors from like the 60`s that was still being used in schools in the 2000`s. No one has ever done a video on them, I remember after that they had a huge tablet laptop thing that was huge in the corp world. Do they still use that in schools in 2020?
I remember that Sharp made a display that could go over the lighted surface on an overhead projector, kinda like those monitor modifications that people would do later on, but in a package that could just be put on and removed if needed.
I remember that our local land registry office had some Husky computers for their measuring teams. I was an intern for 3 weeks and there were all sorts of problems with that Husky. One day, the geometrician threw his hat at the ground and repeatedly jumped on it out of anger. He was a man of little height and from a distance, he looked like a frustrated dwarf steaming off and cursing that damn Husky.
Neil was confused about the TOPBENCH. The thing he was looking at is what he filled himself :-). He must of created machine profile earlier while playing with the program, it got added to systems database.
Had Huskey Hunters at British Steel when started in 1987. Been around since early 80s I think. Were used by operators to take coke oven temperatures then downloaded by serial link to a PDP!
That’s an interresting bit of computing hardware. It looks like it also has a VGA connector on the back besides the serial and parallel ports. The Mark 3 and Mark 4 Ford Escort is kind of nostalgic to me, I just love 80’s Ford cars. My uncle had quite a few Escorts in the 80’s which where company cars from his employer at the time.
Ruggedisation: I remember working for the State Veterinary Service here in the UK in the early 2000's. The vets kept dropping their government phones in poo and puddles so we were sent the government solution of phone protectors... They just sent us extra large condoms to put the Nokias inside. Funny; but not a joke :/
Husky computers used heavy use of RAM disks, the only Husky's I hafe that used FLASH were the Husky FSxx & Husky MP2500 which is just an FS3. My aim is to collect an example of every Husky Computer.
4:50 incidentally, a pinball is a 1-inch steel ball bearing and I know some people who tested pinball cabinet glass by dropping the ball on it repeatedly from heights ranging up to 2m without visible damage. tough stuff that as well
The Texas Instruments 486 is actually a relabeled Cyrix 486SLC. Which is kind of a 486 at its core, but externally a 386SX. That means it has a 16bit data bus and a 24bit address bus. Limiting throughput compared to the 32bit of the 386DX and true 486 CPUs. Also RAM is limited to 16MiB, similar to the 286 and 386SX.
We had some Panasonic tough books at work and your closing comment of driving a car over it made me smile. One of our field users did do exactly that, whilst leaving the house and i presume they were putting it in the boot they were distracted and had to go back in the house. The toughbook which to be fair was in a canvas carry bag was run over when reversing out the driveway. The tough case not sure on the material but i thought was plastic???was damaged but the toughbook continued to work until it was decommissioned many many years later. I think it was a CF-30. Oh and
Tough Books are really good. I had a customer who forgot one on the thread of a big logging machine and it got run over. The only thing not working after was the cd drive.
The Husky Hunter, the predecessor of this, was used extensivelty by McDonalds in the early 1990s for time recording and accounting in each store in the UK.
That connector for the ethernet is a Lemo connector. We used them for crash test systems for TRL and MIRA. That plug and socket woukd have been £100 alone!
That BNC network connection is known officially as 10BASE2 (also known as cheapernet, thin Ethernet, thinnet, and thinwire). It was at least at one time a less expensive alternative to other network types in use at the time and a predecessor to 10BASE-T (Twisted pair) which is the wired Ethernet standard we known use today. 10BASE2 used coaxial cable where you wire the computers up in series using BNC T connectors at every computer with BNC coaxial cables going between each T connector and with the last computer in the line requiring a terminator for the network segment to work properly (just like was required for SCSI daisy chains). Of course 10BASE2-T is now cheap enough and so much faster that 10BASE2 is likely only used in some legacy environments where the if it ain’t broke don’t fix motto applies, assuming they could could even add 10BASE2-T networking to such legacy hardware in their case.
Cool my first car was a 1995 maroon Ford Escort Encore with an amazing 1.3 engine with a maximum speed of 90 going down hill lol. Brilliant video as ever. Seeing this video reminded me to email you about that bug I bought from you lol.
The site in coventry that they moved to, which was the courtaulds factory has recently been demolished and there is now a massive housing estate in its place. (source, I live in coventry and go past that area regularly)
I worked tech support for a company in the late 90's called micro-solutions and we manufactured parallel port peripherals such as floppy disk drives, tape drives, cdroms, hard drives, and such under the product line "Backpack". They were externally powered and had dos and windows drivers. So potentially you could have used one of those products with this machine to expand its capabilities. :^)
I remember a friend had a laptop with a screen like this in the early 90s, we tried to play pinball fantasies on it, which had the best pc-speaker sound I had heard at the time, but was obviously completely unplayable with the ghosting.
I remember one of these (or a clone) being shown off on The Big Breakfast on Channel 4 TV (in the UK). The hyped (and allegedly drugged) up presenter Johnny Vaughn dropped it in a nearby canal by mistake.
You do not under any circumstances want nicotine deprived tankers near ordinance. Ever. I'm surprised the seating doesn't include nicotine patches in modern MBTs.
WRT the chip showing 50Mhz and the BIOS 25, i would bet that they were all made as 50s and they just have another hidden option or jumper to make it run faster. Easier on the development and making multiple boards.
Thank you for watching! Did you own this or another rugged computer / laptop? What did you have and did it survive the punishment you threw at it? I'd love to hear your stories.
Neil - RMC
Howdy Neil! While it wasn't designed as one, I had a Thinkpad T42 for the end of my school/start of my college years. I dropped it, spilled things on it, scuffed it, bag got knocked off tables, the usual. It simply didn't care. Belligerent to the end, it continued to work despite all the punishment until someone broke the screen by knocking it off a table when it wasn't in a laptop bag. Replaced the screen really easily and it was back in the game!
I collect & restore & document Husky machines. Love them. I have a whole serise of videos on my channel covering them. I have:
1. DVW Microelectronics Husky
2. Husky Hunter
3. Husky Hunter 2
4. Husky Hawk
5. Husky Hunter 16
6. Husky hunter 16/80
7. Husky FS2
8. Husky FS3
9. Husky MP2500
I have multiple of these machines, if you need any info ROM dumps on them let me know. Used one of my Husky Hunter in uni to lean coding. Converted the C# to BASIC to help understand how to code. Was fun & noone understood my method. I also have a manul for the Husky Hunter.
I don't Know if this Counts or not but i have a Panasonic toughbook cf-28 Running Windows 98se! My go to Travel Laptop For Windows Gaming as i cannot Find a Dos Sound Driver! :-)
Great Video as Usual Neil! Very Informative! Could i Possibly have the Name to the Liquid Drum and Bass Tune you use During the Unscrewing Montage? Legend!
Thanks Nathan! In this video I am unscrewing to Oak Tree Slumber by Flat Theory
The fact that the directory listing on the PCMCIA card takes that long the first time is actually a quirk of MSDOS, in that it goes through the FAT to determine the amount of free bytes. Paired with the fact that 2GB is quite a lot of storage for a computer in this era, this takes quite a bit of time on the first invocation. DOS then remembers this, so the subsequent calls are instant.
Yep, DOS had to add up all the unused clusters to compute the free space.
Thanks, was looking for this.
I have the same problem on my 286, which has a ginormous 1GiB Compact Flash as its hard disk. First dir takes 2-3 seconds.
If you activate Smartdrive it will take care of that little issue I believe
Amiga Retro Time ...and then you will have 300k free memory left. :-D But seriously, one could probably recover a rather big lump by using EMM386 and activating UMBs. Then try and load the PCMCIA driver into upper memory, if possible. Or install QEMM386... it works wonders and can even use extended memory for DOS, freeing up most of conventional memory.
I have a 486sx 25mhz version of this without the co-pro. On seeing your video I got it out and had a look. I do not have a psu and the handle and pen are missing, but I have box and manual. It would not boot, no prompt so I Paw-CTRL-PWR for 5 seconds, it resets the Husky and up she popped - I look forward to trying out some of your tips on this now, maybe getting something running on it - Oh as a bonus I found a 20MB PCMCIA flash card inside, can't wait to see what's on that! The internal flash drive also says DOS 1.3 on it!!!
Thanks for a great video
Just to update - The util /r and util /c commands came in very useful and I have a full DOS environ. It is actually 6.22 with 1mb total mem. The PCMCIA card had a copy of FastMap700 v1 it looks like a gps logger program - last entry was Oct 1999, so guess this is what it was used for.
Also, my screen looks the same as yours, nothing around the edge. The manual talks about removing the plexiglass front with a fingernail or knife and does not mention any type of seal. So I guess this is how it is from factory?
So - thanks to your help Neil, I got it all working - now, wheres wolfstein???
Any way you could scan the manual?
That LCD is ideal to play Ghosting and Goblins
I would LOVE to see a Raspberry Pie kit that looks like this one!!
The price of such a kit will be corresponding, I guess ;)
You could buy separate keyboard and screen, rip the parts out and 3d print a case for cheap.
I remember using a few of the Husky devices for housing stock condition surveys; they got quite heavy after a full day carrying one but they were easy to use and were definitely sturdy. I'm not convinced about the battery life claim though and seem to remember having to plug it into the cigarette lighter socket between surveys.
At least the battery life isn't as short as my LG Series 900 laptop PC: the factory specs is 15 minutes on a full charge! The reason for that is that it has a 19" wide screen display and a 3.5" HDD. Not SSD, a HDD.
part of the battery life would be dependent on how active you are between charges, if you're pretty busy inputting data during that period of working between charges the inflated best case scenarios will always be significantly more then real world use.
i had one along with a NEC mobile phone and i had TEN batteries for the phone that were either in my pockets or on charge (i seriously carried four around just in case i had three phone calls of three minutes to make !!) and when i reached site i would rush to find a socket to charge my husky BUT who else did anything like it at the time and what was their battery life ?? everything was shit until Nokia .
.my Nokia 3130 is still charged from 1998 and has lost only one bar !!!
Yeesh, huge props to 'Mike' at handheldsystems.com because there was going to be _no_ way you would've figured out that boot option/recovery process otherwise. The only mention of the process I was able to find is in a manual for a later model (Husky MP2500) ...which I only found by looking for the whole 'YKSUH' thing in the first place.
That being said, the manual for that might also be really useful for the FC486: citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;?doi=10.1.1.362.9514&rep=rep1&type=pdf or Google for "HUSKY MP2500" "System Developer's Guide"
Recently got a hold of one of these myself. Unfortunately no AC adapter, and the battery is beyond dead. Any idea what the pinout/power requirements for this device is? I'm thinking I might be able to make my own adapter.
@@TheDapplez I’ve got the same issue
That battery is an absolute unit! The motherboard is such a neat and compact layout, very cool design.
was that a "first" edited out?
@@AlistairBrugsch Haha sadly not, pretty much the same comment but more rambling!
A 90s Rugged robot boi used to explore inside caves...so literally a retroman cave computer 💻 😳
You mean a dinosaur and a caveman met eachother...
God bless Mike in support. Not all heroes wear capes. 🙏
From a support pov its probably also nice/interesting when someone asks about a 25+ year old piece of (exotic) hardware.
@@mrpetit2 yes! Like asking them to talk about an old friend. Happened when I was asked to support an eee 701 in 2009 after I left tech support...not quite the same vintage, but still left me with a warm feeling.
I don't get called a hero for saving, rescuing and repairing/resurrecting tech though.. I get called weird! Haha!
That's really impressive that a someone from a modern-day company was willing and able to help you out with this thing.
Using a Game Boy emulator on this would be weirdly authentic.
Built like a tank, defeated by a stylus battery door. Great video!
22:35 that delay is normal. My IBM PC does the same thing with its 20MB C: drive. It has to calculate the free space and after that it just keeps track of changes.
That network connector is a LEMO connector, very nice but very expensive connectors. The small 4 pin connectors for my Trantec wireless systems are ~£20 each.
omg that duracell battery
This seems kind of ahead of its time.
We had one of those back in the day. Used it at a convention for car dealers and workshops around the time vehicle inspection (MOT) was introduced here in Norway. Our software was nowhere near finished but we managed to show a running mockup. Dropping the machine on the concrete floor drew a lot of attention.
18:50 *BANG BANG BANG* "I did open it carefully"
Yeah, can't imagine how that happened...
A Husky and an installation of ArcPAD, oh those were the days. Rugged devices really were rugged, tough and built to withstand most things. Nice bit of Retro Neil, thank you.
What a neat piece of kit. That 30 min flew by. Thanks for sharing and keep up the good work, RetroManCave!
Fantastic. I would love to get one of these. I noticed 'WIN' written on the label on that disk module, and thought that must be Windows. The Pen version was surprise, but of course makes sense, and I'd forgotten about that version. I was thinking batteries in the pen.
I want an iPad case/keyboard version of this. Such an utterly practical design. No hinges to break or let dust in. Ports all well protected at one end and the rest is sealed. The handle/stand/cover for the exposed ports is ingenious.
That thing is actually pretty slick for its time, I could see it being a really useful robust mobile terminal with that serial port.
That screen looks great.
Like a DMG GameBoy without the blurry afterimage which makes it perfect for working in outside or industrials environments.
I'd love a recreation of that for a Raspberry Pi
Good idea, though a modern version would need to be heavy duty plastic instead of cast Magnesium for the case. Firstly, the an injection mold of that complexity would cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars, but, more importantly, it's VERY hard to find anyone who does Magnesium castings outside of China these days. Explosion hazard.
That said, because of the size of a Pi compared to the 486 board, you could basically make the case nearly one solid chunk of plastic for even more rigidity.
@@elHosed Actually the metal case doubled as a heat sink. Husky was bought by Itronix, which, in turn was bought by General dynamics. It should be bootable from a pcmcia bf card. adaptor , As I recall, it's limited to a cf card of less than 4M
Husky was bought by Itronix, A US manufacturer of ultra-rugged laptops. Itronix was, in turn bought by General Dynamics (Makers of the HMV - Hummer - military SUV.). I owned an Itronix XC-6250 "Cross Country" laptop - a 386 compatible with similar construction features plus a additional features like Ardis WAN, glow in the dark keyboard, and in original condition was waterproof to twenty feet deep submersion. The XC-6250 was also know, as the Indestructible Laptop after one was run over in a parking-lot mishap that damaged the parking lot pavement but left
the computer fully functional with only a few scuff marks on the case
On the back of the unit, there are 4 contacts these were used with a vehicle docking station. the contacts use capacative isolation.
@@coolelectronics1759 The closest thing to a craftsman computer is the 5100sc scan tool
The screen is quite special as there is a gel pad between the glass and screen to shock absorb any impact. They used to drop them out the first floor window to demonstrate the bouncibility.
27:56 Lol, when the gun gets shot, it sounds like one of those rubber chicken toys. I can't unhear it
Another great video! After seeing MS-DOS and Windows running on a battery-powered machine with restrained hardware I am even more happy that modern embedded devices with an operating system are nowadays dominated by open source and Linux :)
This is so cool, and amazing that it still has support. Love all this old tech that I'd never herd of! Thanks for the video.
You're welcome Jimbo, thank you for taking the time to watch it
It looks awkward on the table, but it's designed to be gripped firmly with both hands as you smash someone's skull in
"Decompilation or disassembly prohibited"
Nice try.
I was involved in the development of several rail track side applications which used these and other Husky models. The model you have is a special with the network port. WPI Husky became Itronix. Itronix then General Dynamics.
The Husky sales guys trick was to drive a vehicle over the computer and show no damage.
WOW , the firm i worked for through the mid eighties to late nineties was a cutting edge building controls firm and they issued me one of these !!! haven't seen one for ever !!! it was brilliant and every lap top or pad i have been issued since is trash in comparison simply because this was so out there and nothing like it to sling on the bar in the pub along with my transportable phone made me "mr hitech it "
Lovely rugged 486 system. Must be nice for strategy and board games.
That is a lovely, lovely piece of design and engineering.
I remember setting loads of these up in the late 90's for a construction company I worked for - totally forgot they even existed!
I used these as an Advanced train engineer for the London underGround Central line trains. They were used with Dos based software for configuring the multiple Modules placed around all the Cars " Carragies" that where the interface between the train computer and all the various sensors for brakes, ATO,ATP,Doors Lights emergemcy alarms and many other essential safety and operational functions within each Car This was in the Mid 1990's when i was working on them based out of Ruislip Depot. the network port was used via a custom cable. I rember the screens being both the black,grey as shown in this Video, as well as some orange coloured ones which where much easier to read in broad sunlight. They had a Soft case with a thick strap for carrying ( we often would end up walking miles ) around the huge Depot to various trains to diagnose systems on a train that may have had a fault. I had only ever seen these at work there and wondered about their origin so thanks for sharing this.
Wow. Ford Simulator. I played that a lot when I was 9. Thanks for the ride back in time!
Oh I could have done with this when I was working with the Department of the Environment in the wilds of Scotland trying to get data from various sensors in river catchments. Tough? Waterproof? Just two things that the Amstrad PPC512 I had to lug up and down mountains most definitely was not. What an utterly wretched machine to try and get working in near zero temperatures and driving rain and hail...
If Neil is feeling especially masochistic, perhaps he can try firing up one of those horrible machines,
What an awesome little piece of hardware! The incredible part is, that that thing would *STILL* be useful for surveying, etc, to this very day.
Great video Neil, thanks a lot :-) fun obscure machine! Sorry for the motion sickness hahaha, I didn't realize ghosting could do that :-D
You got your 100k subscriber plaque, in the set now, congratulations. That Rom module is surprising for the time period. Great video.
Great video, Neil. I always like seeing these unique machines.
Also, my family had a copy of Ford Simulator many years ago - I recognized it from the intro "music" without looking! Thanks for bringing back some fond memories - cheers!
I like the form factor and the ruggedness of the case. I am sure their is a market out their for a case like this to be filed with whatever SBC people have in mind. A vary nice video all the way around.
I wouldn’t mind a full-featured computer like that today. Something I can just throw around.
Panasonic make them. Dell makes one competing against the Panasonics . However, they are priced for industry rather than the home user. I regularly use a Panasonic CF20 but was shocked when I saw the price www.ebuyer.com/884927-panasonic-toughbook-20-cf-20-mk2-10-core-i5-256gb-ssd-win10-pro-cf-20ev001te?mkwid=s_dc&pcrid=51482417339&pkw=&pmt=&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIxeObnezE6gIViLTtCh0xMAN2EAQYASABEgIxN_D_BwE
Buy a ToughBook. They’re really expensive though
Manuel are there even any modern ToughBooks? If I do buy another laptop, it’d probably be another used ThinkPad as there are tons of parts for those.
Mute Stingray yes!
I love the LEMO connector BNC adapter. I am using similar ones to connect my instrumentation hardware. They are expensive but still a solid bit of kit.
I love that it looks like something straight out of half life 1
Hahahahaha I totally guessed the "battery in the pen" thing! :-D
Wolfenstein 3D and motion sickness is actually a thing, i remember getting nausea when playing that game.
I also get motion sickness when playing some sequences of Half Life 2, especially when driving the buggy and the hovercraft.
the hovercraft was the first time i got 3D motion sickness in a game, ahhh memories
That would be a perfect candidate for a OPL2LPT to give it some spicy FM Sound.
That PC speaker playing the Wolf3D noises is kind of adorable, honestly.
the gun sounds like a dog barking. I love it.
My brother had one of those! He was a surveyor at the time, and used one on building sites. When he left the company, they allowed him to keep it! He offered it to me when I was a student as a techy curiosity, and I said no, thinking it was some specialist device and not a computer per se......I wish I'd said yes now! He had the 16mb upgrade, apparently it really was a bit chuggy without it.
YES! The whistling music is back for the 1ClickPrint ad!
This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while, thanks for the vid :)
Oh those were the days - a Husky with an installation of ArcPAD. Rugged devices really were rugged - still have a few sitting in a drawer somewhere.
Now thats a rugged looking computer! Really liking the build quality.
I love this video! Sent a message to a mate in UK because I would dearly love one! I am in Australia and do want!
That was amazing. What an in depth look at that crazy cool system. Thanks big time Neil, well done.
Wow! We had a very similar version of Ford Simulator growing up! Vivid memories of that one!
I've owned some seriously tough Dell Latitude XFR laptops, this thing really reminds me of them. What I like about them is the fact you can cram a lot of high end hardware in one and it will be practically invincible given the only true drawbacks being a tank and screen quality isn't XPS like for sure. It's price you pay for a tough road warrior. Plus most engineers don't care about how nice a screen looks when it comes to just getting the work done..
You can just see one of these being used to log maintainance issues on a Challenger tank - just before it gets thrown at the guys who broke it!
For fixing the pen I would try a trick I've seen on Jan Beta's channel mixing superglue and baking soda to create a substance you can build up on a surface that becomes somthing like plastic.
I used something like that in the late 90s. Same looking pen and screen. The issue we ran into was sunlight. You brought it out in the sun (where I used to work a lot in) the screen would go black and would take a good couple minutes to come back to be readable again.
what a thing of beauty! you should check freedos drivers to see there's a smaller reopacement for the pcmcia driver. and memory managers like dosmax that lets you load more stuff in the higher chunks of memory
The story of the British electronics industry. Where Philips designed and made the first CD player and Teletext chips is now a Builders Merchant. the building shown here was demolished to build it www.dailyecho.co.uk/business/864455.philips-sell-off-spells-uncertainty-for-350-workers/
That Chip is an Early SSD!
Many years ago we had cards that you could load up with sticks of RAM and use them a bit like a modern SSD. They were very fast, the place I saw them was using them for data logging where presumably they needed the speed... this was early early 90s. If I remember right they had a battery on the card so the data wasn't lost as well.
Obviously too expensive back then for home users though, RAM was pricey.
Weren't those called DoM, Disk on Module back then?
Often times little PCBs with flash storage with a right angle 40 pin IDE connector (or proprietary for smaller footprint) to directly plug into system boards?
The Neo-Geo console had a pcmcia memory card for game saves. Cant remember if it had a battery though.
I did some investigating, and what i can see on there, is a BIOS flash chip, a 128KB second flash chip, and two mask ROM chips, probably 4MB+2MB or 4MB+4MB in capacity to store Windows installation. Mask ROM is the same - and also similar capacity - as would be found in a console game cartridge of the time. None of those are writeable in normal use, so i don't think calling them an SSD is even close to justified. The installation probably happens to a RAMDisk in computer's main RAM when no external PCMCIA storage is used. Since it's only for DOS and Windows 3.1, the RAMDisk emulation was feasible in BIOS as int13h handler and similarly the amount of RAM visible to DOS and Windows 3.1 can be limited by BIOS so it doesn't go trampling over the RAMDisk.
Very enjoyable. What a fantastic piece of kit!
Anyone remember toes short lived projector computers that would be put on toes old school projectors from like the 60`s that was still being used in schools in the 2000`s. No one has ever done a video on them, I remember after that they had a huge tablet laptop thing that was huge in the corp world. Do they still use that in schools in 2020?
We never had pc hookups for it, but my math teacher had something for her graphing calculator
I remember that Sharp made a display that could go over the lighted surface on an overhead projector, kinda like those monitor modifications that people would do later on, but in a package that could just be put on and removed if needed.
Recently we learned that government can just give an exam out and end the school time instantly.
I remember that our local land registry office had some Husky computers for their measuring teams. I was an intern for 3 weeks and there were all sorts of problems with that Husky. One day, the geometrician threw his hat at the ground and repeatedly jumped on it out of anger. He was a man of little height and from a distance, he looked like a frustrated dwarf steaming off and cursing that damn Husky.
That was the first thought as i saw the device: CAN IT PLAY WOLFENSTEIN? nice find, love these rugged relics if the old days!
What an interesting little machine! It did say 50MHz for the CPU on the benchmark programme.
Neil was confused about the TOPBENCH. The thing he was looking at is what he filled himself :-). He must of created machine profile earlier while playing with the program, it got added to systems database.
EEVBlog feelings... "Don't turn it on, take it apart"
Had Huskey Hunters at British Steel when started in 1987. Been around since early 80s I think. Were used by operators to take coke oven temperatures then downloaded by serial link to a PDP!
That’s an interresting bit of computing hardware. It looks like it also has a VGA connector on the back besides the serial and parallel ports. The Mark 3 and Mark 4 Ford Escort is kind of nostalgic to me, I just love 80’s Ford cars. My uncle had quite a few Escorts in the 80’s which where company cars from his employer at the time.
Today’s sponsorship should be Mike. He made this possible. I’m sure you would’ve figured it out on your own but I’m happy it worked out!
Awesome system and presentation. Thanks!
Love your testing went straight to playing games, just where I would have gone :)
Ruggedisation: I remember working for the State Veterinary Service here in the UK in the early 2000's. The vets kept dropping their government phones in poo and puddles so we were sent the government solution of phone protectors... They just sent us extra large condoms to put the Nokias inside. Funny; but not a joke :/
I think I'd be tempted to get a load of Sugu or something, and make a new seal for around the screen, if OEM replacements aren't available any more.
The world needs more Mikes
Husky computers used heavy use of RAM disks, the only Husky's I hafe that used FLASH were the Husky FSxx & Husky MP2500 which is just an FS3.
My aim is to collect an example of every Husky Computer.
I knew you'd be here dude! lol
@@whatamalike of course was not going to miss out on husky content
4:50 incidentally, a pinball is a 1-inch steel ball bearing and I know some people who tested pinball cabinet glass by dropping the ball on it repeatedly from heights ranging up to 2m without visible damage. tough stuff that as well
The Texas Instruments 486 is actually a relabeled Cyrix 486SLC. Which is kind of a 486 at its core, but externally a 386SX. That means it has a 16bit data bus and a 24bit address bus. Limiting throughput compared to the 32bit of the 386DX and true 486 CPUs. Also RAM is limited to 16MiB, similar to the 286 and 386SX.
7:15 Yeaaah D'n'B disassembly montage \o/ I really love these hahaha!
Definitely a device worthy of taking spelunking in the cave.
We had some Panasonic tough books at work and your closing comment of driving a car over it made me smile. One of our field users did do exactly that, whilst leaving the house and i presume they were putting it in the boot they were distracted and had to go back in the house. The toughbook which to be fair was in a canvas carry bag was run over when reversing out the driveway. The tough case not sure on the material but i thought was plastic???was damaged but the toughbook continued to work until it was decommissioned many many years later. I think it was a CF-30.
Oh and
Tough Books are really good. I had a customer who forgot one on the thread of a big logging machine and it got run over. The only thing not working after was the cd drive.
oh and?
Love the Sega box "graph paper" shirt Neil:)
The Husky Hunter, the predecessor of this, was used extensivelty by McDonalds in the early 1990s for time recording and accounting in each store in the UK.
That connector for the ethernet is a Lemo connector. We used them for crash test systems for TRL and MIRA. That plug and socket woukd have been £100 alone!
That BNC network connection is known officially as 10BASE2 (also known as cheapernet, thin Ethernet, thinnet, and thinwire). It was at least at one time a less expensive alternative to other network types in use at the time and a predecessor to 10BASE-T (Twisted pair) which is the wired Ethernet standard we known use today. 10BASE2 used coaxial cable where you wire the computers up in series using BNC T connectors at every computer with BNC coaxial cables going between each T connector and with the last computer in the line requiring a terminator for the network segment to work properly (just like was required for SCSI daisy chains). Of course 10BASE2-T is now cheap enough and so much faster that 10BASE2 is likely only used in some legacy environments where the if it ain’t broke don’t fix motto applies, assuming they could could even add 10BASE2-T networking to such legacy hardware in their case.
Pretty cool design, looks like something out of a scifi movie.
That design is gorgeous
Cool my first car was a 1995 maroon Ford Escort Encore with an amazing 1.3 engine with a maximum speed of 90 going down hill lol. Brilliant video as ever. Seeing this video reminded me to email you about that bug I bought from you lol.
was looking around, and no other pictures show a rubber seal, so my guess is the polycarbonate shield just isn't lined up perfectly.
It may have 'drifted' over time like the adhesive that holds rubber feet on old equipment.
The site in coventry that they moved to, which was the courtaulds factory has recently been demolished and there is now a massive housing estate in its place. (source, I live in coventry and go past that area regularly)
I worked tech support for a company in the late 90's called micro-solutions and we manufactured parallel port peripherals such as floppy disk drives, tape drives, cdroms, hard drives, and such under the product line "Backpack". They were externally powered and had dos and windows drivers. So potentially you could have used one of those products with this machine to expand its capabilities. :^)
I remember a friend had a laptop with a screen like this in the early 90s, we tried to play pinball fantasies on it, which had the best pc-speaker sound I had heard at the time, but was obviously completely unplayable with the ghosting.
I remember one of these (or a clone) being shown off on The Big Breakfast on Channel 4 TV (in the UK). The hyped (and allegedly drugged) up presenter Johnny Vaughn dropped it in a nearby canal by mistake.
from a subscriber-fratic... thank you for yet another cracking video :)
TIL: Tanks have cigarette lighters.
Sort of, if there's a 24V connector for the boiling vessel it's not unheard of to make an adaptor to run other things.
You do not under any circumstances want nicotine deprived tankers near ordinance. Ever. I'm surprised the seating doesn't include nicotine patches in modern MBTs.
Loved this one. Fascinating stuff.
WRT the chip showing 50Mhz and the BIOS 25, i would bet that they were all made as 50s and they just have another hidden option or jumper to make it run faster. Easier on the development and making multiple boards.