Benford Does Stuff

TSo in today’s episode of computing anachorism, I present to you the Fujistu Stylistic 1000, one of the first mass market attempts at putting an ordinary computer into a touchscreen, tablet-based, form factor. Hailing from 1996 this fantastic piece of technology was not just the future, it was made of the future: A fully functional computer in a package weighing less than 10 lbs (~ 5 kg) with a battery life of much greater than 30 minutes, and multiple shades of greyscale. Instead of using a mouse, you could poke the screen with a special kind of pen to click things. It’s like having one of those funny PADDs from Star Trek or something.

The Stylistic 1000’s engineering crew spared no expense when forging this dreadnought of a machine:

• 9″, 640×480 greyscale transflective LCD Monitor (outdoor readable!)
  • Backlight can be turned on for indoor use
  • Also had a standard VGA output port, capable of displaying up to 800×600 resoloution in full, living color
• 100 Mhz Top of the line Intel 486 Processor
  • Optionally, you can set the CPU to automatically underclock down to 50 Mhz during idle times to save on battery life
• 8 MB of System Ram (with one expansion slot, mine is up to 24 MB)
• 1 Ps2 Port, 1 Serial port, 1 IRdA port, 1 Paralell port, and room for a docking station
  • More ports than the average fruit-shaped computer
  • The docking station allegedly had USB, in 1996!
• Main Battry (numerous cells, something like 8-12)
  • Completely user removable (also unlike certain fruit shaped computers)
  • My battery still lasts several hours on a single charge
• 3x PC Card Slots
  • This is far more than any laptop on the market today
  • One of these was a “Type III” PC Card slot, which originally held a hard drive (270 MB Standard).

Clearly the design team felt like promethius, stealing fire from the gods. Fujitsu originally sold this device for the ~$3000 range. I found a pile of them at a thirft store one day for $5 each. I picked out the two that had batteries, a Stylistic keyboard, and a few manuals. Granted, nothing worked initially, but I was able to scour the internet for an appropriate power supply, and between the two machines, I had enough parts to get one of them working properly. Behold its glory:

I would add Music from "2001" here, if I wanted to look like a myspace page

This is a Stylistic with no accessories attached. Soon we shall be citizens in the “Paperless Office” paradise. Of course, true paradise would have fewer offices.

About as much expansion as you can shake a stick at

The rightmost slot in the above picture is meant for the PCMCIA hard drive. Note the lack of floppy or CD-ROM drives. How would anyone load an OS on here? The original disk came with Windows 3.1 or 95 pre-installed from the factory, and if the drive were eventually damaged, you could send it back for a replacement. Lacking such a drive, and finding them to be rather rare on the internet, I went for a better solution. The hard drive bay could also hold standard PCMCIA cards, which included a Compact Flash Adaptor. I went for the most obvious solution:

Now it has a solid state drive; take that, macbook air

The key saving grace here is that the Compact Flash card and the IDE hard drive are 100 % pin compatable. I was able to install FreeDos onto a compact flash card using this adaptor. FreeDos (and any OS) will just see the CF card as if it were an ordinary hard drive. The freedos wiki is probably a good source for installation instructions. Having a whopping 512 MB availalble, I installed all optinal packages, totalling about 200 megs of space.

First step into a new world

Freedos booted just fine on my desktop PC, so I moved the flash card over to an ordinary CF adaptor, installed it in the Stylistic, and hoped for the best.

Oooh, promising

Even vi can have the appearance of having a heart

So freedos worked just fine on this little wonder-machine. It could even run a small gauntlet of useful programs, such as vi (for those interested, emacs was also available, but I couldn’t remember out how exit out of it). If you noticed, the vi screenshot has the backlight turned on, making this computer look like the world’s largest pocket watch. For a comparison shot, check below:

Vi, now in transflective flavor

The backlight vastly improves visibility indoors, but the transflective screen does a good deal better outdoors than any modern computer.

But what about games? Games are among the most popular types of application available for the iPhone.

It's just like being in the Captain's chair!

Freedos is a compilation of open source efforts, and as a result it has quite a few nifty tricks up its  virtual sleeves. I’ll try to get proper networking and like at a later day, but check this out:

OpenGEM at its sunday best

One such included package was OpenGem, an entire windowing system written for DOS. Features include:

• Full mouse support
• Ability to have windows stacked on top of each other
  • This of course, also includes the ability to have multiple windows in the first place
• Text editor, with power roughly equivalent to notepad (but why would you use it when you have vi?)
• Trash can / recycle bin for deleting items
• Ability to detect disk drives such as:
  • Floppy disks
  • Hard disks
  • And Compact Flash cards masquerading as hard disks
• Ability to launch DOS programs from within the windowing system, then returning to the windowing system after said program is finished executing

So the whole system works pretty well for what it is. Here are a few shots of the complete setup:

3/4 shot, worthy of some computer magazine

This complete, Ultraportable setup includes a full sized trackball mouse

I’m using a serial based mouse here because I could not find my proprietary digitized pen for making use of the touchscreen. That project will have to wait for another day.

As far as other options go, I have also managed to install Pebble Linux with great success! Though I had no windowing system, I could hop about the internet with easy, thanks to a combination of Lynx, ssh, and ftp clients. I will neet to cover that process another day, but it is at least equally as cool as having a super tiny DOSbox.