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Gridcase 3

smp

smp

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Joined
Oct 4, 2011
Messages
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Location
Bedford, NH, USA
I took a little bit of a look and I didn't see any recent postings about a Gridcase 3 so here goes my newbie question:

I see what appears to be a nice clean Gridcase 3 on eBay. I am not familiar with the value out there in fantasyland, but the value of this one will be determined between me and the Seller.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/331494094957?_trksid=p2060778.m1438.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT

The questions that have come up for me are:

Looks like the Gridcase 3 was a floppy only system? At least, that's what this one seems to be.

This machine has MS Word in ROMs. However, the Seller says that when he issues the command C:/Word (I believe he meant A:/Word command) the sign-on screen shows but then it does not fully load. He appears not to know how to operate the machine, or he is playing the dummy. Does anyone here know how this is supposed to operate?

I have not been able to find any documentation online for this machine. Can anyone offer any pointers to any?

The Seller seems to have some sort of floppy disk that the machine can boot from. Does anyone know if this machine will use pure MS-DOS? If so, what version? Should it be able to go with MS-DOS 3.3? Could I hold any hope that MS-DOS 5.0 or 6.2 might work?

Thanks in advance for any advice or assistance you may have to offer. Thanks for listening.

smp
 
It looks like the seller updated his description to fix it with a: as per your question. Could be a bad rom seating or perhaps bad ram? I'm not familiar with that system but some like the Tandy 1000HX DOS boots off a rom also and does show up as c:\. That may confuse folks.
 
The GRiDCase 3 came with either a 720k floppy drive or a 10Mb Hard drive and will boot from a standard MSDOS disk (I used 3.3 & 5.0 on mine)

The contents of the Word ROMs fitted in this machine should show up as files on drive A along with whatever is on the floppy disk.

They are really nice systems with one of the best plasma screens I've seen on a laptop. Really regret selling mine now :(
 
Thanks very much for your attention and comments , barythrin and Moonferret.

Now I am concerned about the possibility of bad RAM in the machine. I was thinking that since the Seller showed the system booted up into MS-DOS, it had passed its POST, but you never know, I guess.

A potential problem with one (or more) of the ROMs is always possible, and I guess it could be as simple as re-seating the ROMs, too.

Oh, well, I will have to ponder this for a bit more. It's a very attractive machine, tohogh.

smp
 
In my GRiDcase 1520 machine at least the ram was one bank of four 30 pin SIMMS with pin headers attached to it.
That I can tell with google the ram is either chips soldered to the motherboard, or on a riser card.
 
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