I took a look at a Canon NoteJet II 486C, a mid-1990s laptop with a built-in printer, and the main question was whether the printer side of it still worked. The machine came from another collector, and it was missing its power supply, so I had to deal with that before I could do much else. Canon pitched this as a portable all-in-one for people who needed to print on the road, and for 1994 it packed a decent enough setup with a 486SLC2 at 50 MHz, 4 MB of RAM standard, and either a 130 MB or 260 MB hard drive.
The machine itself was pretty boxy, but not outrageously thick considering there was a printer inside. It had printer controls on the top, a paper feed slot at the front, and around back there were PS/2, serial, VGA, parallel, an expansion slot, and the power input. It also had two PCMCIA slots with blue eject buttons, a missing battery, rear flip-up feet, and a service hatch that exposed memory, a math coprocessor socket, and a lithium battery. Mine had clearly been opened before, with missing screws, a broken corner, and an odd coin-turn screw at the hard drive bay.
Since I didn’t have the original adapter, I modified a barrel plug to fit the 3 mm center-pin power jack and brought the laptop up on a benchtop power supply. At first I had power lights and hard drive activity but no usable display. Once the screen warmed up, it came to life and I could see the startup prompt that had been causing the beeps. I set the date and time and found a very IBM-looking setup utility, complete with IBM copyright text and a graphical BIOS interface that let me check memory, toggle the TrackPoint, and run hardware tests.
The BIOS and keyboard layout made the IBM connection pretty obvious, especially with the TrackPoint in the middle of the keyboard. I also found that the machine had a surprisingly polished setup program, including video test modes and a diagnostic menu for items like the keyboard, planar, floppy, and parallel port. The passive-matrix color display actually looked better than I expected once it was up and running.
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 booted, and I switched video output over to an external CRT capture setup so the screen was easier to see. I tried pushing the display up to a higher Super VGA mode, but that left Windows unusable. I went ahead and fixed that the old-fashioned way by dropping to DOS, running Windows Setup, and restoring standard VGA. After that, Windows came back normally.
There wasn’t much installed in Windows itself beyond a locked Pacemate application, but DOS and WordPerfect turned up a few clues about where the laptop had been used. I found a 12-lead ECG tutorial, a WordPerfect document about pacemaker patient evaluation, and a 1995 memo with charges for a doctor. That pointed pretty clearly to medical use, which fit the Pacemate software.
The printer hardware was accessible by opening a front hatch for the BJI-201 monochrome Bubble Jet cartridge and lifting the keyboard to expose the paper feed path. When I powered the laptop alone, it drew about 0.6 amps. Turning on the printer caused an immediate power cycle on a 2 amp limit, and raising the supply to 4 amps still produced an error state with the printer stop and data indicators. The computer side worked, but the printer didn’t, so the next step was a teardown and deeper troubleshooting.
— Aaron
Links
Timestamps
00:00 – Intro
00:38 – History
04:06 – First Look
08:16 – Interesting BIOS
11:42 – Windows 3.11
17:32 – Programs
20:03 – Testing The Printer
23:29 – Wrap Up