Nice find: DEC HiNote Ultra II

From: Bob Shannon <bshannon_at_tiac.net>
Date: Sat Aug 9 09:24:00 2003

Speaking of the DEC HiNote...

There are a very small number of DEC HiNote prototypes out there that
have about 11 PCI lines
missing on the motherboard between the system bus and the sound chip.

'Someone' at DEC had signed off on the testing, but it had never been
performed. So this major
bug went into the first production run and was only caught after the
units started comming off the
line.

I know the person responsible for this major blunder, and one of the
people who caught the problem
at DEC. I've personally seen this bug demonstrated, and I can garuntee
these systems existed at
one point.

I have no idea whats happened to them now.

Fred N. van Kempen wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>Today, a long-time customer surprised me with a biiig box full
>of their "old stuff". OKOK, that wasnt too smart of him.. after
>our coffee chat, I didnt do much besides going through the box'
>contents *evil grin*
>
>Amongst the fun stuff were a Siemens Hicom PBX (yay!) which I
>installed there in 1998, and, even more yay!, some of his old
>laptops: a DEC HiNote Ultra II, a HiNote 500 and a Fuji Lifebook.
>
>The UltraII was his own, and damn, did I spend some time on that
>thing in those days. Ugh. And now.. same all over again.. trying
>to get it back to life. All manuals, cards, docks etc were in the
>box, so no surprises there. The clock batt had died, but the box
>still had the "in case your clock dies" DEC update pkg, and yay,
>it worked: nvram/clock is back to normal. All other things seem
>to work fine (machine, screen, disk, Mobile 6X dock) so after some
>cleaning up on the hard drive, I now have a nice, very lightweight
>lappy for hobby fun.
>
>(yes, and it makes a GREAT term for serial/TCP/LAT with the WiFi
>card ;-)
>
>Shitty thing is... (a) the battery pack seems to have died, and
>(b) I lost my copy of the SystemCD for reinstalling the system
>onto it. Not a very big deal, I guess, but having it would be
>nice.
>
>Soo... anyone have of these gathering dust somewhere?
>
>Lappy is a P8X/LYS5133 (P5/133 model, 16MB) with the 7.2V/3300mAh
>stick-shape LiIon battery pack (FR-PCP8H-AB)
>
>Cheers,
> Fred (happily LATting into Tru64 ;-)
Received on Sat Aug 09 2003 - 09:24:00 BST