Over the last months I've been buying Retro tech from a gentleman in St. Paul that I met through a mutual friend. He's been collecting for a long time and has some really interesting stuff. I think the oldest machine I've gotten from him is an Apple IIe from 1983 but this article is about one of the newest things I've gotten, a rugged tablet computer from 2005 (a Hammerhead XRT from Walkabout Computing).
I'd never heard of this machine before he texted me an image of it and asked if I'd be interested. I was able to find the Users Manual online, and I was intrigued. The device is ultra-rugged for Military and other high availability applications, based on the asset tag it looks like this one was used in the airline industry. When I got a look in person the screen was in good shape. He didn't have the Power Adapter so I had to buy it without knowing if it would work or not but I've had good success with most of the items I've purchased from this seller so I took the risk.
On getting the unit home I used the Multimeter to probe the power pin and prove to myself that it was Center Positive, I sorted through my power supplies to try to find a 15 Volt unit, or at least a barrel jack of the right diameter. I didn't find a 15 Volt supply with enough current but I did find the right barrel jack which allowed me to power the unit from a bench Power Supply.
The machine booted! I was quite relieved, but it turns out that this early win soon gave way to frustration. Taking the tablet apart I learned that the hard drive had been removed. It uses a 2.5" 44 pin IDE Hard Drive and I have plenty of replacements so that was not problem, but I also could not figure out the hotkey to enter the BIOS. Since this is a rugged computer, it's possible that they have this feature locked out, or it could be as simple as me not using a compatible USB Keyboard. I was not able to find any additional technical detail online other than the Users Manual, some reviews, and a forum thread about running Linux on the tablet.
So, I was stuck with making due with whatever hardware the BIOS would recognize in its current configuration. The machine does have a single USB port, and I was able to get the machine to boot off a USB Floppy Disk drive, and once or twice off a USB CD drive, but this was inconsistent. I ordered a second USB 2.0 hub, thinking that I might have a compatibility issue between the BIOS and my USB hub where the machine can not discover CD drives behind the hub, but I have not tested that yet.
In the meantime, I tried to load the OS onto a Hard Drive using another machine, then move it back into the Tablet PC. For Windows XP Tablet Edition, this did not work. Perhaps due to differences in the HAL between the two machines, XP Locks Up on boot. Based on another article I thought I would try an old version of Ubuntu, but long enough after this machine that it might include hardware support for the touchscreen. I loaded Ubuntu version 10.04 (2010) on the machine, and it booted and runs great! Such a relief to have something running on the machine, the touchscreen is working as is a USB Ethernet dongle and other USB peripherals as well...
The Specs of this machine are:
Pentium III Mobile @ 800 MHz
512 MB RAM
60 GB HDD
USB
2x PCMCIA Card Slots
Once I got the machine running, a "loose end" was to solder up a more permanent power solution. As is probably no surprise, the batteries are completely dead on this machine and so it will remain plugged in all the time. Through testing I determined that the machine would run fine at 12 Volts, and so I was able to find a 12 Volt 3 Amp Power Supply in storage to solder up with the barrel jack for this machine.
So, the remaining items on this machine are: Continued experimentation to enter the BIOS of the machine and looking for additional technical information online. Try to load Windows XP Tablet Edition on another PIII machine and see if I can get that booting, and also to find a larger Flash Based storage solution that is recognized by this BIOS (A the current time, I had only a 2GB CF Card w/ adapter, which really isn't enough storage to do anything interesting with this machine, like load the entire contents of Wikipedia in case of a Zombie apocalypse).
Let me know if you've ever used one of these machines, or if you have any background information about the Hammerhead.
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