[sounds]
If I got this grotty old bag out and told you I was about to administer some drugs into
your system, you might be a bit on edge, and I wouldn't blame you!
But this, is, something far less sinister.... than that...
on the front it says, model 8820 programmer, Medtronic, and inside, is something.. wonderful.
Let's delve in.
Also, thank you to my sponsor, Kaspersky..... yes.
Yes, Medtronic 8820, this is a certain bag for a certain job. It's also a little tatty
and grotty in places, but inside in a treasure of wonder... and wires... and printer rolls.
Of course, the main star is this Epson ActionNote 4000 laptop, or notebook if you prefer, and
it actually plugs directly into this metal slab built into the case, along with a parallel
and serial connection.
But look at this precious thing, it's absolutely tiny, and actually it served an incredibly
important purpose. First I'll talk about what that purpose is, and afterwards we can delve
into this beauty of a notebook in more detail.
So Medtronic was founded in 1949 by Earl E. Bakken and his brother in law, Palmer Hermundslie.
Operating out of a garage in north east Minneapolis, they initially set to work repairing medical
equipment for hospitals. By 1957, having made excellent relationships with physicians and
staff, they moved into equipment manufacture and created the first battery powered, wearable
pacemaker.
They quickly moved onto a fully implantable device before expanding into other areas including
implantable defibrillators and spinal cord stimulators. The culmination of this work
and knowledge, allowed them to produce the SynchroMed implantable infusion system, with
the first test patient implanted in 1982. After extensive clinical trails it was commercially
released in the US, during 1987 and can be used for chemotherapy medication, pain management
and "intractable spasticity" among others.
The core of this technology is the lithium powered infusion pump. Once implanted it can
be refilled through a tube, and it can be programmed to administer varying amounts of
drug through this; an external programmer. This setup is one of the first, and what I
have here is the 1994 revision, based around the much more portable Epson ActionNote.
On initial boot, we get numerous BIOS checks informing us of the whopping 4MB of RAM, and
rapid 33MHz clock, before reporting that the CMOS battery has, naturally, died, but we'll
get back to those later.
The ActionNote is set to boot straight into a program called Medtronic SynchroMed System,
and it's from here that you can control the dosing of the patients infusion pump, using
this. Not it may look like an irregular mouse or hand scanner, but wired straight into the
chassis of this case, it's actually an external programmer, which uses radio frequency to
communicate with the SynchroMed.
You can control infusion modes, rates, even check the volume of drug left in the reservoir,
with the connection signal indicated by these lights on the top. Of course, I don't have
a patient with an installed SynchoMed to hold this up to, and even if I did, I'm clearly
not qualified nor suitable enough to do so, but honestly, I find it fascinating to think
that this thing was lugged about from patient to patient, to ensure that their implanted
device was doing the right thing at the right time, and saving lives, fundamentally.
Once your patient is done, you can use the built in thermal printer to whip off some
notes on dosage and the like, it's configured to just do it's job.
------
> It's interesting, there could be numerous customer records on this notebook, but thankfully
on this occasion that data has been wiped. >
> But it got me thinking about the online world we live in, and how much more permanent
and spread out our data now is. >
> Music apps, social media, customer logins, even through search we leave a trail of our
activity and personal information. So what you might say? Which is fine, until this stuff
is used against you. >
> It's so easy for someone to do a search of your name for instance, along with a few
unsavoury terms, and use anything they find to harm you. I mean look at this guy, he's
got glasses AND a beard. Dodgy as hell. Maybe it's a future employer, or something you've
just upset in the past, our online trail is long, and very hard to control. So it's important
to make sure you stay on top of it. >
> Kaspersky's privacy checker can help you hugely in this regard. Whether you're setting
up Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, YouTube, even Windows 10. Set your desired
privacy level, and the online tool can inform you exactly how to batten down the hatches
and keep everything secure. The instructions are straight forward, accurate and always
up to date. >
> Maybe someone out to cause harm or stifle your chances doesn't worry you, but the fact
that companies are literally building profiles of our online activities for our their own
marketing needs might. In either case you can find out which parts of your online life
you need to change, and how to tweak the settings to effortless enforce them.
> > Unfortunately, we're no longer in the 90s,
so please do take a look at the link below to clean up your modern life. It's free and
very straight forward.
------
So what's in the guts of this thing? Well, the ActionNote is connected to this bottom,
metal box through its serial port, parallel port, and it also appears to be earthed at
this point here. Unscrewing all of these, and the box below yields this vision of electronica.
So, over here, we've got the controller card for the SyncrhoMed Programmer. There's an
NEC D78320L chip there, which is actually a 16 bit CPU, combined with a ROM, RAM and
realtime pulse control that facilitates operation of the SynchroMed motor. Then we've got some
RAM and control chips surrounding it. Over here, of course, we've got the power supply
unit for the ActionNote.
Pretty interesting, but of course, we can disconnect all this medical equipment altogether,
and then we're left with the purity of the ActioNote, and I really like this thing. It
just feels so nice. The surface is this matt, what almost feels like sandblasted surface.
We've a PS/2 port and curiously, a VGA out in addition to our standard rear ports, and
this thing is just so tiny. It puts the portability of most modern laptops to shame.
But if we take a trip back to 1993, this wasn't anything particularly special. In fact the
ActionNote was battling a lot of similar and even superior competition;
In November 1993, Byte Magazine were one of the first to review the system, pitting it
head to head with the mighty IBM ThinkPad, under the classification of sub-notebooks.
"The guiding idea behind subnote-books has been compromise on features to shed pounds.
The result is systems under 4 pounds but with external floppy drives and less processing
power, smaller screens, cramped keyboards, shorter battery life and higher prices than
standard notebooks"
A tough category to fit in, and you can see that the ThinkPad 500 beats it in almost every
category.
The late March edition of PC Magazine also got in on the act, this time using a scatter
chart, but with a similar outcome, and part of that is down to the CPU Epson decided to
run with; A Cyrix 33MHz 486 SLC.
Now, the SLC might carry the 486 label, but really, it's just a super-charged 386. It
has a 486 instruction set, and 1K of Level 1 cache, but relies on the 386SX's 16 bit
datapath, meaning a standard full blown 32bit 486 would leave it dead in the water. It also
lacks a maths co-processor, although the motherboard does have space to fit one to improve the
situation.
But other than that, I really like this little thing. This one has the top end 120MB IDE
drive, which as you can see, has been cloned especially for its medical use. It's got a
64-grey scale LCD, with some nice adjustment features built in, and it has a built in trackball
to the top right of the keyboard. Not great for lefties, but fine for most. All this and
it's just 10 x 7.5 x 1.5 inches.
I didn't receive the external parallel floppy drive with mine, but it does have another
neat treat. On boot you may notice it loads a CARDTALK driver, and assigns the D: drive
to it. This actually allows you to use the PCMCIA slot as an additional drive. Of course,
we need to stop it autobooting into the Medtronic program, as once we're in, there doesn't seem
to be a way to get out of that, but once I've done that, and bought a PCMCIA compact flash
card reader, well then....
Well, apparently waiting a day for Amazon Prime to deliver the flash card, meant the
hard drive decayed enough to actually destroy the CARDTALK driver.
I literally had to hold the drive in front of a heater, to get it to finally manage to
read it.
But I couldn't get it to read this particular card. Not with these settings anyway, and
given the hard drive wasn't playing ball enough for me to play around with it, I decided instead
to go for another option.
I mean, ultimately, I just want to see what Doom is like on this thing. So behind a plastic
panel, which had been sellotaped down, I was able to take the drive out, plug it into a
modern PC, and well, either the drive died completely, or Windows 10, for whatever reason,
refused to acknowledge it at all. Likely the latter.
So plan, what are we on? C? This involved an alternative drive. Toshiba again, but this
time a whopping 80GB IDE drive. I tried setting it up to boot into DOS using a utility called
BOOTICE, copied some files over, and then.... well, then I realised that the little BIOS
on this Epson doesn't appreciate hard drives over 8GB, which is incredibly common on these
old machines. This Epson still has a BIOS where you need to configure the drive type
by Cylinders, Heads, Sectors, and so on, so it gets a little upset when you whop something
so large in.... ahem, and that's what she....... So onto another solution.
So that Compact Flash card I was tying to use before, can be repurposed as a hard drive,
if you happen to have an IDE adaptor. Here's one I had shipped in, but even with this,
there are still issues to overcome. First of which is that making a Flash Drive bootable
without a floppy drive isn't as simple as you might think.
Tools like the former mentioned BOOTICE or RUFUS can write Master Boot Records and make
USB sticks bootable, but old machines like this, aren't really too fond of the output.
What I had to do was rather more complex...For this, I opted instead to use this adaptor,
which allows you to connect an SD card up to IDE. This Epson actually has a further
BIOS limitation, meaning it can only recognise a 500MB drive, so this half gig SD card is
perfect.
To configure it, I decided to plug the whole shebang into a USB IDE reader, just so there
were no discrepancies, and then went about getting a bootable version of DOS 6.22 installed.
The trick to this was to use Virtual Box, and make it believe the SD card is a Virtual
Drive. Then, perform a standard DOS install using disk images, which should in theory
make this SD card appear as a normal bootable DOS 6.22 hard drive. There's an excellent
guide to do this, which I have linked below. Once I'd Fdisked the hell out it, got the
DOS setup disk to format it, and then install everything, it was time to copy Doom across
and give it a blast...
Well, after I worked out what drive settings this SD card adaptor needs. Obviously this
thing doesn't have Cylinders and heads like a conventional hard drive. You can run a DOS
command to call up some drive info, but these values are more like placeholders and they
don't always work. In the end I had to tweak the values so that the calculated drive size
was spot on, and then, then....
What you're hearing here is pure unfettered relief. Relief at having messed around with
this thing for 3 days in a row, and only now getting it to boot.
Now, NOW we can play Doom.
Although on this screen, it's evident you wouldn't want to. I imagine this is how a
drunk cat would perceive the world.
Not just that though, you can really feel the wannabe 486 chip crumbling under the pressure.
Windows works pretty nicely, and everything boots fast, thanks to the SD card.... although
you quickly realise that the trackball is actually a piece of crap. Especially as the
only place you can rest your hand is directly on the keyboard.
Here we go, Solitaire runs a bit better than Doom at least. Maybe not the Flying Windows
screen saver though.
The Hot Dog theme looks... well, it looks just like any other theme on this screen.
Disappointing.
What we need to do is hook up an external monitor and then...
GET THIS COLOURFUL BEAST OF A LIFESTYLE.
LOOK AT THAT. Your whole world is transformed. Doom even feels faster thanks to the lack
of screen ghosting.
And Windows Hot Dog looks like, well, it looks like Windows Hot Dog. What more could you
honestly need in your life. This is where Windows, dare I say it computing peaked. Hot
Dog and trackballs that have as much inertia as a set of PlaySkool roller skates
So I guess we've reached the culmination of this video.
What started as a clearly defined, exclusive use medical setup to help people, can now
just about be used to shoot Zombie faces off with a shotgun.
And after all, isn't that what we really want from all medical equipment?
I kinda feel like this video has turned out similar to an incredibly tame variation of
From Dusk Till Dawn. In composition at least.
Thanks for watching and have a great evening.