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Old Pen Computers Never Die

I live with geeks. Between all of us, we have about 45 working computers of all shapes and sizes in a house of six people. Most of us are graduate students at the University of Michigan, and while this keeps us busy, we still find time to goof around with random technology. We saw Kalidor's 2100 pen-based computers for sale at onsale.com (and online auction house specializing in reconditioned and remaindered computer products). Being relatively fetishistic about pen-based computers, we bought four.

For those of you who haven't seen the Kalidor 2100s: these are really cool! Instead of fragile plastic shells, unreadable displays, and hardware no-one else uses, these are a hacker's dream. The Kalidor is a grey rubber brick with a glowing etch-a-sketch screen, and real ports sticking out of the back. It uses a 486-25 processor, and comes complete with Windows 3.1 and Pen Extensions 1.0. You can't get these machines anymore, but I understand that the 2100's younger brother, the 2500 is still selling in Japan.

Pen Extensions 1.0 (PE1.0) only runs under Windows 3.1 (W3.1), but it's quite a nice suite. The handwriting recognition is trainable for any word, and there are some really neat tools. The major disadvantage to PE1.0 is that it only runs under W3.1; Windows 95's (W95) setup actually demands that you remove it in order to complete the installation (and don't think we didn't try to work around this). While W3.1 is a nice system, it doesn't have a number of features that discriminating geeks want: 32-bit applications, integrated networking (forgive me, but Window For Workgroups is a hack) and cool, up-to-date programming tools. While Microsoft did create Pen Extensions 2.0 (PE2.0) for W95, they only distributed it to OEMs and on beta versions of W95. We were lucky in that one of our housemates has every disk Microsoft has sent out in the last few years as wall decorations; we just kept pulling them off the wall until we found PE2.0. This task may be harder for people who aren't developers, but remember, a number of OEMs do distribute PE2.0 with their pen-based computers. Just beware: PE2.0 won't have a lot of the cool functions which you've grown used to in PE1.0 (most notably, gesture support).

Upon receiving our K2100s, we promptly decided that we wanted W95/PE2.0 to run on them, but there were a few hitches. Kalidor doesn't exist anymore; they've been disbanded/absorbed by ALPS. There is no explicit driver support for the Kalidor's display or tablet. While cool, the Kalidor doesn't have a CD ROM drive.

We tried the obvious answers first; we navigated ALPS phone network for a few hours, until we found a Kalidor tech support voice mailbox. After leaving an e-mail address, we heard back the same day from Robert. He explained that the 2100s were never meant to run W95 (and that no-one had tried, to the best of his knowledge), but he could send us some drivers and registry entries, if we really wanted to goof with our machines. Above and beyond the call of duty, Robert mailed us some files and gave us a lot of advice about the internals of the 2100.

Using these files, we tried to install W95 (OSR2, the cool OEM second version) from a parallel Zip drive to the Kalidors 170 MB hard drive (there's just enough space), but found that at numerous points during the installation, a keyboard is required. We tried creating a setup script for W95, but learned that OSR2 doesn't use the same serial number tag as in the original setup scripts. Since the K2100 has no keyboard jack (all editing must take place over a bios-supported serial link), we were out of luck.

Discouraged, but not through, we physically disassembled our Kalidors, removed the PCMCIA hard drive, inserted it into a machine with a fresh W95 install (all standard device drivers), and used the arcane phrase xcopy32 /s /h /e /r /c /k /q <source> <destination> to copy an exact system image under W95 while it was running. Lo and behold, upon re-inserting the drives, they almost booted! We disabled APM (the Kalidor power management seems to be a little different), and tried again: it worked! We were in W95! But, of course, we needed to use a serial mouse to navigate, with no keyboard and no tablet support. Later on, we found that using SerialKeys in W95 (under Accessibility Options) can provide quite adequate keyboard support.

Upon installing the drivers Robert had sent us, we were disappointed to find that we still couldn't use the pen as a mouse, no matter what we tried. We were sure the tablet was working, and that drivers were correctly installed; what was the problem? We poked around for a while and came upon the idea that perhaps the pen mouse drivers didn't actually work as a mouse, but only interacted with pen services. We were rightÑafter installing PE2.0 on our fresh W95 machine and re-copying the files to the Kalidor's drive, we had pen support. By adding the old Kalidor power management DLL and the flashram driver to the config.sys, we had (almost) complete W95 support. This process occurred over almost a month, and involved a huge time commitment; you have to ask: "was it worth it?" Our answer is: "certainly!" We now have portable computers which are pen-based, water resistant, impact resistant, and whenever you point them at one another, they network! Better than that, we can run our favorite applications on them (OK, so PE2.0 isn't too great, but the trade-off is still good). Looking at them now (especially when they're emulating our HP calculators, PalmPilots, or Super Nintendos), people ask how they can own one. While we think that the Kalidor is one of the best products we've ever seen, we're sad to say that you can't own one anymore. I guess that this is another example of how the computer industry doesn't always choose the best product (we miss you, Apple Newton). If you do own one though, there's no need to throw it away (if you're considering this, we'll be happy to buy it)ÑW95 can give your Kalidor a new lease on life. Cheaper than a PalmPilot Pro, faster than a Toshiba Dynapad, able to run 32-bit applications in a single bound (and survive the fall afterwards) it's Kalidor!