EEVblog #949 - Australian Made Vintage Laptop Teardown!

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The Dulmont Magnum "Kookaburra" from 1983 is the only laptop to have even been design and made in Australia, as well as being one of the world's first "clamshell" laptop designs.
Dave tears down this obscure retro classic based on the equally rare 80186.

UPDATE:
John Blair has responded about this video:
Dave
Thanks so much for sending this along; I got a huge kick out of it.
I can answer some of the questions you raised in the video:
(*) You're right there was no removable R/W storage in 'laptop' mode; the 'disks' that MSDOS saw were implemented in RAM. You added removable storage by connecting the dual floppy drives via the parallel connector that you noted on the back.
(*) I wasn’t the original designer; I was brought in to run the software team (once Barry had the prototype hardware up), which I did throughout. Chris T was brought on later to run the hardware team; he and I worked together. Terry Crews was originally hired before me as engineering manager before me but it was immediately clear that he had no clue what he was doing in that role; they made him marketing manager, where he was responsible for those remarkable ads that you cited.
(*) The parallel port wasn’t really custom – was a standard configuration for that era.
(*) The 15 way ports were serial ports for printers et al, as you note later
(*) The RCA connector was a video port, as you note later.
(*) You're right that the ROMs contained MS-DOS – we actually had to modify MSDOS so that it ran from ROM, which was hard to do; lots of Gatesian self modifying code. I don’t believe anyone else got that to work, but it had a major benefit, in freeing up all the SRAM for stack and RAM disk
(*) 6:46 is classic, but in Barry's defence the model you have there is some weird prototype; hence all the kludges and the handwritten labels.
(*) The 80186 was NMOS, as you note. That was kind of the miracle here. Barry and I didn’t want CMOS because they were so so slow. But NMOS consumed a lot of power. The solution was to mod MSDOS so that the CPU and all of its support could be powered off between keystrokes; each time you hit a key, the 186 would come up from cold, and transparently reenter the OS. As you note. Gave us all of the performance of a PC and great battery life. We were much faster than 8088 desktops of the time.
(*) You Got It Working!!!! That’s so great! Congratulations.
(*) Drive B wasn’t ready because it was the plug in ROM
(*) The SRAM kept alive all the time – that’s where the RAM Disks were
(*) The tirade at the end isn’t really fair – this was a prototype between the Magnum and the Kookaburra . None of the points you make about removable store, video etc are correct – remember that when you plugged in a video monitor and disks, this was the fastest desktop PC of the time, that you could also take on the road.

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Dave, great to do this; great to see. I can answer some of the questions you raised in the video:
First a general point: the way to look at the Kookaburra / Magnum is that it was a high performance desktop that you could take with you. When you plugged in the external monitor, keyboard, and floppy drives, you had a full IBM-compatible desktop that was much faster than any of the 8088 based machines then on the market. Unplug it, and you still had a working, portable, machine – but, inevitably for the time, a weaker display and no removable storage.
(*) Second, contrary to many of the comments, you can make a '186 based machine IBM-compatible. The challenge was that the PC BIOS used some of the same software interrupts as the '186 hardware interrupts. The solution we came up with was to develop an interrupt handler that looked to see the source of the interrupt – if software, give it over to the BIOS; if hardware, process it appropriately
(*) You're right there was no removable R/W storage in 'laptop' mode; the 'disks' that MSDOS saw were implemented in RAM. You added removable storage by connecting the dual floppy drives via the parallel connector that you noted on the back.
(*) I wasn’t the original designer; I was brought in to run the software team (once Barry had the prototype hardware up), which I did throughout. Chris T was brought on later to run the hardware team; he and I worked together. Terry Crews was responsible for those remarkable ads that you cited.
(*) The parallel port wasn’t really custom – was a standard configuration for that era.
(*) The 15 way ports were serial ports for printers et al, as you note
(*) The RCA connector was a video port, as you note.
(*) You're right that the ROMs contained MS-DOS – we actually had to modify the MSDOS code so that it ran from ROM, which was hard to do; lots of Gates-ian self modifying code. I don’t believe anyone else got that to work, but it had a major benefit, in freeing up all the SRAM for stack and RAM disk
(*) 6:46 is classic, but in everbody's defense the model you have there is some weird non-production prototype; hence all the kludges and the handwritten labels. The production Kookaburra was much cleaner, lost the forest green color scheme, and was all buttoned up
(*) The 80186 was NMOS, as you note. That was kind of the miracle here. Barry and I didn’t want CMOS CPUs because they were so so slow. But NMOS consumed a lot of power. The solution was to mod MSDOS so that the CPU and all of its support could be powered off between keystrokes; each time you hit a key, the 186 would come up from cold, and transparently reenter the OS. As you note. Gave us all of the performance of a PC and great battery life. We were much faster than 8088 desktops of the time.
(*) You Got It Working!!!! That’s so great! Congratulations.
(*) Drive B wasn’t ready because it was the plug in ROM
(*) The SRAM kept alive all the time – that’s where the RAM Disks were
So, thanks again for such a great video!

johnblair

I led the software team; there were around 5 of us. Barry Wilkinson was the original hardware genius that did the design, solo. Chris T came on a bit later and ran the hardware team as we scaled up, Terry Crews did the marketing and ads.

johnblair

Awesome video. Really fun watching these vintage teardowns, Dave really makes the teardown interesting with the back story of the products and chips.

irides

Haha that brings a new meaning to a block of RAM. I've never seen so many DIP's crammed so close together XD

neardood

I had to stop the video to comment about how much I love that you put the correction on the laptop's screen. :)

GothPanda

I hope that you preserve this laptop as machines of this vintage are getting to be too rare and expensive for most collectors.

MrKillswitch

These early - mid 80's computers bring back memories...

electronicsNmore

I'd bet the use of SRAM over DRAM certainly helped with the battery life. No power being wasted on refreshing them constantly.

stonent

Oh wow. That's a gorgeous vintage goodness. I am so jelly Dave. I love obscure electronics, a vintage Australian laptop just have extra good ring to it.

TheKsax

From the old-computers online museum "drive A corresponded to the software in ROM, drives B and C, to each
optional ROM expansion, D to the internal C-MOS RAM, E and F to the external floppy disc drives".

bwack

Shame you did not get to hook it up to a CRT

KabukeeJo

IBM loved that stupid foam too, they put that shit over everything !

andljoy

The Wikipedia article says it could attach to two 5.25" floppy drives or an external hard drive - perhaps the port on the back was a proprietary/combination one for both the HDD and floppy drives? I'm not really sure about disk connection standards before ATA/SCSI though.

usagold