4 ms·

I have one of these. It's so adorable. Unfortunately, mine has no builtin CD-ROM, floppy drive, ethernet, serial, or parallel port, so I have no way to get any

by krylon 4y ago

I have one of these. It's so adorable. Unfortunately, mine has no builtin CD-ROM, floppy drive, ethernet, serial, or parallel port, so I have no way to get any data onto or off the thing. It has Windows 95 and Office 95 installed, and that is it. Looks like it's been hardly used. I keep it around for the nostalgia boost, but I can't do anything with it.

loloquwowndueo 4y ago
How was that thing ever useful? Did the previous owner have some peripherals with which to move information in and out of the thing?
- ndespres 4y ago
  It had an external docking station with more standard ports, I/O breakout ports to connect accessories like floppy disk drives, built-in modem, and PCMCIA add-in cards.
- jaclaz 4y ago
  It had PCMCIA and a kind of parallel port for an external floppy, but this latter was a proprietary connector for which adapters (and I seem to remember also docking stations) existed: https://en.ysrl.org/butterfly/review.html https://en.ysrl.org/butterfly/review.html
unwind 4y ago
Does it have USB port(s), then? Windows 95 might handle that if patched/updated properly, I think.
- loloquwowndueo 4y ago
  The 701c predates usb :)
quercusa 4y ago
Could you use a PCMCIA wifi card in it?
- krylon 4y ago
  Hypothetically, yes. But I am not optimistic about Windows 95's ability to deal with wireless networks. Also, you end up in a situation where you need a working network interface in order to download the driver for said network interface.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    If you can remove the hard drive you could probably copy data to it directly, including drivers for a PCMCIA ethernet card.
trasz2 4y ago
>Unfortunately, mine has no builtin CD-ROM, floppy drive, ethernet, serial, or parallel port So it's like modern laptops? ;-)
- krylon 4y ago
  Kind of, but without WiFi, Bluetooth, or USB.
caycep 4y ago
that's the thing w/ perfect restorations...old cars/computers end up being nice to look at but not that useful. Especially w/ computers before the "internet" was widespread.... Vs it would be neat if they did some kind of restomod, i.e. implant a Raspberry Pi or some small board in there w/ an upgraded screen w/ wifi and bluetooth...
lproven 4y ago
> mine has no builtin CD-ROM, floppy drive, ethernet, serial, or parallel port, None of them had any of those things. USB had not been invented yet, and writable optical disks were fantastically high end kit that cost more than the whole laptop. 100Mbs Ethernet was relatively new and not that common yet; at home, I still used 10Mb/s thin Ethernet because it was much cheaper than UTP Ethernet, which needed powered hubs. The cheap'n'nasty Acer-made Thinkpad i1200 series that replaced my TP701 in 2001 didn't have a floppy, serial or Ethernet, either, and only USB 1. But it did have Cardbus. That stuff was all left out of 1990s laptops to keep the cost down. For my TP701, I have an external floppy drive, but I also have PCMCIA SCSI for a SCSI CD-ROM drive, and PCMCIA Ethernet for networking, and a PCMCIA modem for Internet dialup while I was abroad. And of course the machine has not 1 but 2 PCMCIA slots, so you can use any 2 of those at once. Find a cheap old PCMCIA Ethernet card -- not wifi, that's too new -- and plug it into an old 10/100 hub. (I picked one out of the trash a few months ago, just in case.) Plug that hub into a modern Ethernet switch. If Windows 95 doesn't have drivers, pull the hard disk, stick it on a $5 EIDE-to-USB 2 cable, and copy the Win95 install CABs onto the hard disk from a modern computer. Maybe copy the driver disk too. Add TCP/IP and the Microsoft Network client, and now it will talk SMB1. Add IE6, or Opera 10, or Firefox 2, or Netscape 9 and you can also FTP upload and download stuff to it. Win95 has an email client, or add MS Internet Mail and News, and you can then email stuff on and off it as well. You can't add USB-anything, because USB needs soft-configurable IRQ and DMA, and that needs PCI, and that needs Cardbus. PCMCIA is ISA in a credit-card format, so USB is impossible. So is Firewire. Both need Cardbus, and you can't retro-fit Cardbus slots. You can have a PCMCIA Fast Ethernet card. That should autonegotiate a connection to any modern gigabit switch. However, the bandwidth of ISA is massively lower than 100Mb/s so it won't be able to run at the network speed. If you get 15Mb/s out of it, you'll be doing well, and that will max out the CPU.
- krylon 4y ago
  My dad had a laptop in the mid-90s that had a floppy drive, and I think a parallel port, too. The Butterfly was meant to be used with a docking station, but I never managed to get my hands on one. I just enjoy looking at it and thinking what a great laptop it was in its day. I'd like very much to have one with a fold-out keyboard today.

by krylon 4y ago

loloquwowndueo 4y ago

How was that thing ever useful? Did the previous owner have some peripherals with which to move information in and out of the thing?

ndespres 4y ago
It had an external docking station with more standard ports, I/O breakout ports to connect accessories like floppy disk drives, built-in modem, and PCMCIA add-in cards.
jaclaz 4y ago
It had PCMCIA and a kind of parallel port for an external floppy, but this latter was a proprietary connector for which adapters (and I seem to remember also docking stations) existed: https://en.ysrl.org/butterfly/review.html https://en.ysrl.org/butterfly/review.html

unwind 4y ago

Does it have USB port(s), then? Windows 95 might handle that if patched/updated properly, I think.

loloquwowndueo 4y ago
The 701c predates usb :)

quercusa 4y ago

Could you use a PCMCIA wifi card in it?

krylon 4y ago
Hypothetically, yes. But I am not optimistic about Windows 95's ability to deal with wireless networks. Also, you end up in a situation where you need a working network interface in order to download the driver for said network interface.
- bombcar 4y ago
  If you can remove the hard drive you could probably copy data to it directly, including drivers for a PCMCIA ethernet card.

trasz2 4y ago

>Unfortunately, mine has no builtin CD-ROM, floppy drive, ethernet, serial, or parallel port So it's like modern laptops? ;-)

krylon 4y ago
Kind of, but without WiFi, Bluetooth, or USB.

caycep 4y ago

that's the thing w/ perfect restorations...old cars/computers end up being nice to look at but not that useful. Especially w/ computers before the "internet" was widespread.... Vs it would be neat if they did some kind of restomod, i.e. implant a Raspberry Pi or some small board in there w/ an upgraded screen w/ wifi and bluetooth...

lproven 4y ago

> mine has no builtin CD-ROM, floppy drive, ethernet, serial, or parallel port, None of them had any of those things. USB had not been invented yet, and writable optical disks were fantastically high end kit that cost more than the whole laptop. 100Mbs Ethernet was relatively new and not that common yet; at home, I still used 10Mb/s thin Ethernet because it was much cheaper than UTP Ethernet, which needed powered hubs. The cheap'n'nasty Acer-made Thinkpad i1200 series that replaced my TP701 in 2001 didn't have a floppy, serial or Ethernet, either, and only USB 1. But it did have Cardbus. That stuff was all left out of 1990s laptops to keep the cost down. For my TP701, I have an external floppy drive, but I also have PCMCIA SCSI for a SCSI CD-ROM drive, and PCMCIA Ethernet for networking, and a PCMCIA modem for Internet dialup while I was abroad. And of course the machine has not 1 but 2 PCMCIA slots, so you can use any 2 of those at once. Find a cheap old PCMCIA Ethernet card -- not wifi, that's too new -- and plug it into an old 10/100 hub. (I picked one out of the trash a few months ago, just in case.) Plug that hub into a modern Ethernet switch. If Windows 95 doesn't have drivers, pull the hard disk, stick it on a $5 EIDE-to-USB 2 cable, and copy the Win95 install CABs onto the hard disk from a modern computer. Maybe copy the driver disk too. Add TCP/IP and the Microsoft Network client, and now it will talk SMB1. Add IE6, or Opera 10, or Firefox 2, or Netscape 9 and you can also FTP upload and download stuff to it. Win95 has an email client, or add MS Internet Mail and News, and you can then email stuff on and off it as well. You can't add USB-anything, because USB needs soft-configurable IRQ and DMA, and that needs PCI, and that needs Cardbus. PCMCIA is ISA in a credit-card format, so USB is impossible. So is Firewire. Both need Cardbus, and you can't retro-fit Cardbus slots. You can have a PCMCIA Fast Ethernet card. That should autonegotiate a connection to any modern gigabit switch. However, the bandwidth of ISA is massively lower than 100Mb/s so it won't be able to run at the network speed. If you get 15Mb/s out of it, you'll be doing well, and that will max out the CPU.

krylon 4y ago
My dad had a laptop in the mid-90s that had a floppy drive, and I think a parallel port, too. The Butterfly was meant to be used with a docking station, but I never managed to get my hands on one. I just enjoy looking at it and thinking what a great laptop it was in its day. I'd like very much to have one with a fold-out keyboard today.