Software on a Compaq Portable Plus
The other day I obtained a Compaq Portable Plus and surprisingly the original 10mb hard drive seems to be working very well. The previous owner deleted most of the files but it is still possible to see bits of what was installed on it.
This machine appears to have been in use from about 1985 to 1990 and involved in office work concerning some kind of material testing. The applications that appear to have been installed were:
DOS 2.11
Lotus 1-2-3 1A spreadsheet
Multimate 3.60 Word processor
Procomm Plus 1.1b
R:Base 5000
Lotus Symphony 1.1
Volkswriter 2.1 Deluxe word processor
Possibly Volkswriter 3
Not all of that is undeleteable, and even then it is just installed directories.
But it is interesting to see a sample of what was actually in use by real people at the time.
This machine appears to have been in use from about 1985 to 1990 and involved in office work concerning some kind of material testing. The applications that appear to have been installed were:
DOS 2.11
Lotus 1-2-3 1A spreadsheet
Multimate 3.60 Word processor
Procomm Plus 1.1b
R:Base 5000
Lotus Symphony 1.1
Volkswriter 2.1 Deluxe word processor
Possibly Volkswriter 3
Not all of that is undeleteable, and even then it is just installed directories.
But it is interesting to see a sample of what was actually in use by real people at the time.
Comments
Also I hope you can dump the BIOS ROM image of Compaq Portable Plus if possible.
I remember buying a couple of 486 ThinkPads with no AC adapter - seller didn't have a compatible one so didn't know if they worked. I happened to have one. One of them was a bit of a dud in that it had a power on password.
The other worked fine and loading up Windows for Workgroups coming up with some interesting apps and documents for a now defunct Australian airline (Ansett). I don't recall them really apart from the usual Office, but it did have one of the earlier SAP versions installed. Some of the spreadsheets left were about airline staff, I think it was used in finance at the time.
Was this Compaq an eBay purchase, or found it by chance by other means? If you're suggesting the 10MB drive is working well, I guess it was well looked after.
I think Compaq Portable BIOS seems not to be dumped as several BIOS revision of IBM PC 5150 / 5160 / 5170.
But they are the same Rev C that are posted here
http://www.pcjs.org/devices/pcx86/rom/compaq/portable/
...Except in normal binary rather than that weird useless .json format.
I guess an earlier Compaq Portable would have been more revealing.
It is the same Rev D board too. I've heard a rumor that the unpopulated circuitry in the upper right is supposed to be for a cassette interface.
The maintenance manual refers to this as a first version motherboard. It has some oddities, such as both ROMs are identical. I'd guess the board was designed for two, may not operate without both, and was then retrofitted with these ROMs.
The manual also talks about putting 640k on the mainboard although this board was only designed for 256k and a decoding PAL must be switched out to do that.
Both U40 and U47 seem to be identical.