Sometimes you find the darndest things at thrift stores. On Sunday, I picked up a 1991 TwinHead SuperNote-SX notebook computer. It came only as the computer itself... No AC adapter, no battery, and no other peripherals or hardware.

It isn't state of the art by a long shot! It has a genuine Intel 386 processor, a 40 MEGAbyte hard-disk drive, 2 MEGAbytes of RAM, and it comes complete with a Passive-Matrix 32 shade black & white LCD display, totaling at around 8 inches. There is a built-in 3 1/2 floppy drive, and a VGA output for an external monitor. There are two seven pin connectors on the back, and a parallel port for an external floppy or daisy-wheel printer. It has no touch pad, and there is no standard mouse port. So, how do you control the graphical shell? With DOS 5, you use the arrow keys!

It took a LOT of work to get it to even run, let alone boot. First, I had to get a power supply that had enough current to power the thing, because it's really thirsty for a laptop. No such luck. So, I hot-wired my Seanix Pentium III computer's power supply and tapped the 5+ lead. The amperage wasn't high enough, so I could either have the screen or the hard-drive, but not both at the same time. At school, I hot-wired one of the Dell computers, and I was able to make it at least run the setup and BIOS. The current was still lacking, so it couldn't boot because of insufficient current to initialize the hard-drive.


Now, when I got home, encouraged by my partial success at school, I fired up my equally vintage Pentium I, with the enormous power supply. Needless to say, the thing was able to push enough juice through the laptop to make it run like a top! I installed three games, one word processor, and I searched through the files to see if I could find out anything.

Here is the strange part: Other than some slight wear to the outside of the case, it's like the thing was never used. It's REALLY clean, and the keyboard feels like new. Considering that the thing cost (suggested retail) $3495, there really isn't any reason why it's like new on the inside. I find it peculiar that there was a nearly clean installation of DOS 5 o the thing, as well. I may just well end up using the thing to play DOS games and run programs because I'm actually quite good at working with DOS, shell or no shell. Heck,I shouldn't be complaining! I only paid a fiver for it!