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IBM PCradio
The PCradio was released in late 1991. Designed primarily for mobile workers such as service technicians, salespersons and public safety workers, the PCradio featured a ruggedized build with no internal hard disk drive and was optioned with either a cellular or ARDIS RF modem, in addition to a standard landline modem.
I had been looking for one of these for a while and this one showed up in Italy. It took a lot of effort to get the seller to ship this item, but we got there in the end and it arrived in perfect condition, but missing it's power supply.
It's mono display works in CGA mode with 80 column by 25 text. Storage was on SRAM instead of a hard disk drive. There was a landline and a cellular model and the cellular one could apparently have an attachable handset.
Here is an original newspaper article talking about the new technology.
Power Supply Pinout
I do intend to build my own power cable and have been given the pinout by a fellow owner:
Looking at the power supply pin holes: Centre hole and and 3 surrounding holes at 10, 2 and 6 o'clock respectively:
Centre - Negative / Black probe on centre,
10 o clock = -9vdc,
6 o clock -8.73vdc,
2 o clock 0v.
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IBM Tablet Type 7344
This tablet is actually some sort of industrial control computer from Japan. Instead of just being a screen to a computer build-in to some kind of machinary, this is an entire 486 computer with it's own hard drive and ports. Originally the screen was vinegarised but impossible to replace - so I de-vinegared it with IPA and managed to find polarisers which were suitable to get a good colour image.
Also doing it without damaging it or the touch controls was no easy feat!
As you can see the machine is like one massive metal heatsink - really rugged and with a hard wired DC input alongside the regular older 4-pin thinkpad connector.
It boots up mostly in Japanese but it seems to boot largely like a 700C would, with, at one point a menu allowing you to choose between operating systems, but it largely ignores what you input because it has some kind of auto boot process taking you into OS2 and some machine control program.
I haven't got as far as circumnavigating this program but it's a lovely little weird machine from IBM japan.
I did manage to find a little info on it. Seems to be based on a 560Z motherboard and my one is an upgraded 7344-TV3 (P100MHz, VGA 10.4", Base 8M, HDD 1G/3G).
Some other pages talking about this machine (in Japanese) are here:
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IBM Tablet Type 2435
This funny little beast is, as far as I know a Japan-only unit made for sale directly to large corporate customers, possibly as a point of sale device. Mine is a 2435-A01
This one I own fully works but is temperamental - despite being recapped, which brought it back to life, it will often power up and beep in response to the touch-buttons down the left hand side, but will not show anything. Sometimes it will boot showing the display on the external SVGA output when docked and mostly it just does nothing.
I worked on this machine for quite a while and was happy when it worked, but often i would go back to it and then it wouldn't and then just when I was about to give up, it would!
As you can see, the machine has it's own battery, and both the tablet and the dock have a power connector, so you can run it inside or outside the dock.
Note that on the back label we can see it was made FOR IBM not BY IBM. I believe it was made by Panasonic.
I shared some more pictures on the thinkpads forum here.
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I was trying to work out what displays are interchangable and a part of that is what interposers are interchangable.
This is a good picture - essentially showing how similar the 755c and 370c interposers are and how different the 755CE/CX/CD interposers are:
370C at the top
755 CX in the middle
755C at the bottom
Here you can see the 755C and 370C interposers along the top. Despite one connector (for the trackpoint) having a different colour's friction lock, I tried the 370c interposer in a 755c machine and it worked fine.
