I found it, the worst laptop ever made.

Yes! Maybe. Let's do weird things with it.

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#GEOS #Laptop #Brother

[evilthatiswes]

This video really brings back memories. I used to work the tech support hotline for these machines (along with the Geobooks) around the turn of the Millennium. In the downtime between calls, we would sometimes experiment with the sample machines that we had on hand. Trying to get games to run was an interesting challenge. It is actually possible to boot the Geobooks directly to DOS and bypass GEOS, although I don't recall the hot keys to do so off the top of my head (That was over 20 years ago now.)

The trouble with Dos games on the PN-9000/Geobook was that keyboard controller didn't appear to return the standard scan codes. Talking to the keyboard through the BIOS commands worked the same as any normal PC, but any software that tried to bypass the BIOS (most action games) would fail. I did manage to get Wolfenstein 3D to work by modifying the source code (which had been open-sourced by that time) to read keystrokes through the BIOS. That worked well enough for navigating the menus, switching weapons, and opening doors, but not so well for movement. However, you could use a serial mouse to handle running and gunning, so the game was perfectly playable, albeit with only PC speaker sound effects.

As for who actually bought these "laptops, " all I can say for sure is that the folks calling the tech support hotline skewed toward being elderly, and many of them did mistake these machines for regular Windows PCs. That said, the callers might not necessarily be a representative sample of the average PN-9000GR/Geobook owner, as those that knew what the machines were and what they could (or couldn't) do would probably not be making calls to the tech support line as frequently.

[robertthomas]

I had a workmate who's daughter told him she was doing bad in school because she did not have a computer. He was our Aston Tate database guy and said she would not have anything to do with that old blue screen junk. He did not want his girl to have access to the internet but wanted her to see him trying to help her with school. He did not have any lose cash as he had been marred 3 times. He ask me if I had any suggestions as what he could do. I sold him an 8086 with PC-Dos and GeOS. She was so happy with the interface and the print output that with her first English paper she got her first A. She got so much feed back from classmates about how her papers looked she started making money selling presentations even for her teachers. She went to go on to collage with her entrance request letters done on that machine. This was in the late "90s.

[crudecrudeofficialband]

Those machines weren’t meant as kid’s laptops or anything, they were the beginning of the extinction of typewriters. Some companies, including Brother, started making electronic typewriters in the 1980s. By the 1990s they included simple LCD screens and floppy drives for limited compatibility with DOS/Wintel text files, and the machines were re-classified as “electronic word processors”. Eventually their specs and software started beefing up to the point where they could be used as a (very) low-end PC and still had printers built into the machines. This type of laptop was being sold in places like Walmart in the second half of the 90s, usually for around $125-$200… far less than even the cheapest laptops. By then the built-in printers disappeared in favor of portability and connectivity to standard PC printers.

So what started off as an electronic typewriter basically evolved into a low-end laptop by the end of the Millenium. For some people who were super broke and in desperate need of a laptop with barebones functionality, these machines were the only solution. Not good per se but better than nothing.

[JohnSmith-xqpz]

Calling it now, next video: this is the cursed worst laptop ever, lets upgrade the heck out of it.

[vwestlife]

It looks like it uses the same motherboard as the GeoBook. That's why it has unused pinouts for features that aren't on this model but are on the GeoBook, such as the VGA monitor output and PCMCIA slot.

[cmedeir]

I worked at Sears and we sold these. They were NOT sold as computers (though they were sold in the computer department) they were sold exclusively as “Word Processors”. College students (on a budget) would buy these instead of laptops because of the price. As I recall, the modems allowed you to connect to the school’s network to submit work, etc. remotely.

We didn’t sell many at our store, but they were not intended as computers. Like I said, not everyone could afford a laptop - especially a student. I had a friend who wrote a doctoral thesis on one and the ability to save to a floppy that could be read on a regular PC was great.

Your mocking the product comes from you thinking of it like a computer, which it was not sold as nor intended to replace.

[ScrapKing]

Fun fact: the PC/GEOS operating environment is multitasking, multi-threaded, object oriented, is built upon a foundation of x86 interrupt codes, and can run pretty well even on an 8086 with 640k of RAM. It was a masterful piece of engineering!

[CommodoreFan]

I remember seeing this being sold at Kmart back in the day, and laughing at them for what they cost at $300, but as a former GEOS user, it is really cool that it does run GEOS Works. I would clean this one up, and keep it original, but if you find another one of these in a bit worse shape, then it might be a cool project to shove a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB with some cooling added on, and a more modern screen in it, and make a retro looking franken laptop.

[RowanBird]

GEOS turned into GEOWorks, which was a competitor for Windows 3.0
EDIT: Also, if it has a 386/486, it must run DOOM!

[rmcdudmk]

This poor Brother machine out here giving Vtec kids computers a run for their money 🤣

[JohnL]

The Brother logos being duplicate, different fonts, and not aligned, is giving me an aneurism

[lucetubegplusstillsux]

Only thing I could guess this was for was like a 90s equivalent to a Chromebook, a crappy cheap laptop that can be bought in bulk for businesses and schools on a budget.

[abigguitar]

These Brother "notebooks" (and I use this term loosely) were priced around $300 (or less) at a time when an actual notebook / laptop would cost you probably $2k or more. Brother was attempting to capitalize on the low price of this device for households that didn't have that kind of money to spend, but still wanted to have an on-the-go computer. It's not a great deal considering what you got, but I guess some people could have been lured in by its portability and price tag.

[awesomeferret]

In many ways this was actually way ahead of its time, with the cost reduced and relatively small motherboard with the SoC. This is basically akin to a Surface RT; not horrible or unusable by any means, but not something that you'd want to use unless you had to.

[daniel_kos]

Great video, though something people forget about Windows 9x PCs in the late 90s was that unless you had a fresh install, Windows itself would "decay", slowing down and crashing more often over the course of a few months. Forgetting to save often enough and losing your document was a common frustration and might explain why niche alternatives popped up from time to time.

[fabtrainspottingandmore]

The fact, it isn't really yellowed is astounding

[livefreeprintguns]

It doesn't surprise me at all Catacomb fired right up... there is an amazing two-part video series by Dave's Garage where he breaks down the Fast Inverse Square Root algorithm they used in quake3. The engineers at iD software were literal mad scientist masterminds.

[Otokichi]

In the mid 1980's I worked for a portrait/photo studio. The resident techie left for a communications company and I was officially a computer operator. I had been a "why do I need a computer?" film photographer, so an evening college course, "Introduction to IBM compatible computers" was next. The studio's computer was an 4.77Mhz 8088 IBM XT running MS-DOS 3, had a 20MB HDD and a 512K full length monochrome display card, with the usual IBM monochrome monitor, The printers were wide carriage dot matrix printers that shook the flimsy table as they nosily consumed fanfold paper by the yard. PFS: Pro Write and File programs, which managed client lists and order forms rounded out my command line world.
All was well until two things happened: A freelance programmer brought pirated versions of XTree and the dBase database programs, which needed color to properly display results. By this time, Computer stores were "everywhere, " so I went looking for hardware and software updates. A half length 640K color display card and larger 14 inch color monitor solved one problem, and I bought XTree 4 and dBase to "keep things semi-legal."
Since I was using a clone 80386SX computer running Windows 3.1, I looked for such a program that would take me beyond the command prompt. PC GeoWorks Ensemble 1.0, then 1.2 turned this "dawn computer" into something anyone could use. I even envied the limited set of scalable fonts while Windows 3.x only had pedestrian system fonts. The arrival of Truetype fonts changed my computer world, and, I eventually set the IBM XT aside and used the 80386SX desktop clone to "do Windows." GeoWorks Ensemble was swept aside, but I fondly remember those days when a GUI came to an IBM XT.;)

[Francois_L_]

If you count the number of pins on the video-out connector, you can tell if it was intended to run on CGA or VGA. From looking at the board, I think it was a VGA machine. Personally, I'd try and soup-up this thing just to see if it could ever have reached it's full potential.

[yussafmalik]

I remember these they were for word processing in 90's and were meant to be basic and very cheap alternative to full PC. In 90's not every one could afford £1500 PC.