I’ve been tinkering around with other vintage projects the last several months. Many of the photos land over on Flickr but I’m pretty sure the googles never index them, so they’re largely undiscovered and I haven’t written widely about them and why I care. So here’s my “life story before the recipe” list.
Logitech ScanMan 32
[photos – flickr: 2024-10 Logitech Scanman32]
This is a hand-held greyscale (32 shades of grey!) scanner that came out in 1992-ish. You had to move it down a page by hand, could only scan about 5″ wide, and only up to 400 DPI. Dad bought one for some reason and I don’t really remember the reason, either he wanted to OCR scan books or notes and it didn’t work like he expected, or he just saw it at Sam’s and wanted it to tinker with. At the time we had a 286 computer with a CGA display and while it worked with the computer, it didn’t work all that well. OCR was done by a DOS program called Catchword. It was the first time I had ever used OCR and it seemed somewhat magical, it still left a lot of hand editing to clean up text.
Graphics and photo scanning was rough, at 300-400 DPI this was greatly more resolution than what the CGA monitor could display. Something just an inch or two wide could easily spill off the side of the screen, and it was a lot of work to attempt to stitch together a single page. Eventually a few years later when I had a faster computer with a VGA monitor I put it to use scanning various clipart and had my own little library of .PCX files I made computer catalogs with. It was quite satisfying to embed a filename in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS (this was before WYSIWYG) and see a rudimentary photo come off the dot matrix printer.
A couple of summers ago I found the thing in a box in the barn where it had been sitting probably for 20 years. It looked like it was in good condition so I was curious if it still worked. It didn’t have the ISA interface card so I wound up eBaying one. Eventually this year I finally got around to trying to hook it up to my 486. I installed an old DOS version of Logitech GrayTouch 1.0 and discovered the thing indeed still worked!
I quickly realized old versions of the software that went with this are missing and hard to find. The only version of GrayTouch I could find was on archive.org, the Dutch version at that. From my old tape backups I had GrayTouch 2.0 but not the whole installer set. I found somebody on eBay who was selling it — at $15 a disk and it was a 3-4 disk installation.
Settings for the ISA card are almost lost too. None of the manuals are on Archive.org. I found one page “Trevor’s Unofficial Q&A Page – Logitech Software FAQs” on archive.org that had the DIP switch settings for the ISA interface card. These set the I/O base address and the software has to know about it.
Scanman Plus ISA DIP switches board 200074
While in the process of researching how to get this thing going again, I found out there was a Macintosh version of it. Specifically, a SCSI interface box that hooked up to the same ScanMan 32 and let you plug it into the SCSI port of a classic Macintosh. Of course now that I have a SE and IIsi, I had to try it out. I found the box, “H7M-1” on eBay for $20 and decided to try it out. It also included another ScanMan 32 and Mac manuals. So now I have two of these damn things.
The Mac software was a little easier to find and was fairly straightforward getting running.
I have manuals for Logitech PaintShow Plus, ScanMan Mac, and ScanMan Plus, I need to get them fixed up and uploaded to archive.org. One looks like it was wet, but otherwise legible. If I run across a good version of the DOS manuals and software, I for sure want to nab it to scan and archive.
I’ve pondered about making a video of this scanner in action on PC and Mac, there’s not many about it. Incidentally Cathode Ray Dude came out with a video about scanners and briefly mentions the Logitech ScanMan, so maybe that’s all the coverage it needs.
Harris TS22ALO butt-set
[photos: flickr – 2024-10 Harris TS22ALO repair]
Ever since the ISP days I wanted a butt-set to test phone connections with. They were a few hundred dollars so I never bought one and instead carried around a $12 princess phone. I recently decided I’m an adult and I can buy one if I want to! I bought this on eBay for like $25, “not working, parts only”. Doing a little reading revealed these things have two batteries. One is the normal 9 volt battery that provides working voltage, another is a CR2032 battery that serves internal functions and if it dies the unit is inoperable.
There’s like one dude on YouTube that has videos of repairing these things and he completely skips over the part of how to actually take them apart. It’s very much draw the rest of the fucking owl. I took several photos along the way so that’ll have to do in lieu of my own teardown video.
The goal is to open the thing up and replace the CR2023 battery that’s inside it. The problem is these handsets are designed to be dropped off a 20′ telephone pole into a lake and survive, so they’re very ruggedized. The entire PCB and all the components, including the battery, are coated in this thick, goopy, rubber-ish plastic coating that’s a complete pain in the ass to get off. It looks like hot glue and you can take little nibbles with needle nose pliers, but it’s not hot glue and you can’t melt it. Cutting it dulls blades pretty fast too. I don’t know if there’s anything like acetone or gasoline that might dissolve it. If only YouTube repair guy would tell us his secrets.
I eventually starting slicing around the battery with a box cutter, very much cutting away from my fingers. I would get a slab of it and start twisting it over my needlenose pliers and eventually was able to peel away the stuff chunk by chunk to get the battery exposed.
The battery holder is spot welded directly to the battery so it’ll have to be replaced. There’s three points of contact with the PCB, two posts on the edge (positive), and one underneath (negative).
I bought some cheap CR2032 enclosures from Amazon, wired up a jumper so both positive contacts on the PCB made connection plus the negative.
Put it all back together and it works! The audio is kind of scratchy, I don’t know if parts have drifted out of spec or it was always like this. But it sure is loud and won’t have any problems hearing it in a machine room!
