Transcription

All right, so check out this weirdness. I don't know how else to put this except it looks like an accident, like a laptop with the screen snapped off, but it actually never had a screen. It came this way from the factory. And the closer you look, the more questions arise. It's from 1999, but only has a floppy drive, no CD-ROM drive, and not even a hard drive. It has a trackpad, but not one for fingers, it's for the stylus. It runs its own operating environment with a custom UI, but it's based on Windows 3.1. And oh my god, it has a 486-like processor inside. This is a legit PC. Wait, what's with the Commodore 64 logo? It's also a C64, what's going on? There is so much delightful weirdness, it's hard to know where to begin. The branding is weird, the form factor's weird, the specs are weird, the OS is weird. The fact it released when it did is weird. It breaks my brain a bit, so let's just dive in. This is the WebIt Internet Computer by Web Computer International. It sold exclusively in Europe, with mine from Germany costing around 600 Deutsche Marks upon its launch there in 1999. As a point of comparison, 600 DM was the same cost as a 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 GPU alone in 99. So a whole PC for that price was pretty low indeed. And that was the idea, the WebIt was designed as a low-cost computer in the tradition of the original Commodore 64, primarily to be plugged into a TV and connect to the World Wide Web. It wasn't just focused on the one task though, like the then-popular WebTV set-top boxes were. Instead, the WebIt was also a proper PC, complete with drives, I.O., and expandability, manufactured by Aztec Systems in Singapore, with the machine itself designed and marketed by Web Computers International in the Netherlands Antilles. As for how they got the C64 brand, eh, it's a messy web of liquidations and acquisitions from the days when anyone touching the Commodore brand was seemingly cursed. Commodore International sold their assets to Escom AG in 1995, who themselves went bankrupt in 1996, with the Amiga brand being sold to Gateway and Escom Netherlands buying the Commodore trademark, renaming themselves Commodore NL, who soon fell apart and were bought by Tulip Computers, who were having their own financial woes in 1998, licensed the Commodore 64 brand to Web Computers. They themselves were defunct by the end of 2000, but before their demise, they managed to release the WebIt Internet Computer. It was announced at the tail end of 98 as a planned series of low-cost internet appliances slash personal computers, with all kinds of upgrades, add-ons, and accessories that never happened far as I can tell, but their affordability and hardware made them relatively popular with hobbyists. And for a while, plenty were available complete in box on eBay, which is how I imported mine from Germany years ago. Despite that, several items it came with are Dutch, namely the box and documentation, each of which are printed in a combination of Dutch with some English. The computer, on the other hand, both the software and the keyboard itself, are German. It's been a while since I've used a quartz layout board, but it didn't take too long to reorient myself. Mostly it's the modifier keys, symbols, and punctuation that took the most getting used to. Otherwise, it's an okay membrane board with just enough key travel to instill some typing confidence. The trackpad, on the other hand, does not function how you'd think. It's pressure-sensitive, but using a finger to use the cursor never feels quite right. It's too imprecise and jittery. And the surface is slick and glossy, like the LCD screen of a PDA. It looks a bit like liquid crystal too, when you press down on it hard enough, and the sucker's even polarized, which makes me think it's an LCD with no visual data running through it. So yeah, this is meant to work entirely with a stylus, where you move the on-screen cursor around using the pen tip and click by either tapping or pressing the buttons below the pad. It's a little sketchy at first since the pad is so small, but it's quite accurate, far more than using a finger. I also quite like how they included this little hole above the keyboard specifically to hold the stylus, rather than sliding it back into its storage slot. I've seen this on drawing tablets, but never on a computer like this. There are no USB or PS2 ports, but you do get the usual serial and parallel, plus a 15-pin game port slash MIDI interface. As well as an infrared transceiver on the front, right next to the system status LEDs. A 56K Flex dial-up modem is naturally built in, being an Internet computer and all that. Though you do have two PCMCIA slots for Type II and III PC cards, so adding Ethernet is theoretically possible, though drivers and software is a challenge due to the OS. And it's all displayed via your choice of VGA, S-video, or composite output ports, right next to the 3.5mm audio jacks. On that note, let's get this fired up real quick and see what we're working with. ["click"] Yeah, beyond that 3.5-inch floppy check, the machine is silent. No fans, no hard drive, no spinning disks till one's inserted. The only sounds begin once the OS is loaded and its theme plays through your speakers. ["Emb OS theme plays through your speakers"] Well, isn't that pleasant? Say hello to EMB OS, or EMB OS, EMBOS? Either way, EMB stands for Embedded here, and it comes from none other than IBM. What we're really looking at is a custom graphical shell for Windows 3.1 Embedded, which is itself running under IBM PC DOS version 7, a software combo reportedly developed by IBM for a cancelled set-top box project of theirs codenamed Bronco. There are multiple pages of up to six application shortcuts, divided up into categories for things like productivity, internet, games, multimedia, system settings, and so on. And this is really where you're meant to spend basically all your time. With Netscape Navigator 3 for your 90s web browsing needs, Lotus 1-2-3 Word Pro and Organizer for spreadsheets, word processing, and such. And shortcuts to many of the standard Windows 3.1 applications, like Write, Notepad, the Calculator and Clock, Paintbrush, Media Player, and so on. And yep, MIDI support is here, and it's not bad. ["MIDI Music Plays"] However, what we've seen here is largely what we get, with limited customization. It's all German all the time on this model, and it's a PAL machine meant for PAL TVs. So there's a 50Hz vertical refresh across both TV and VGA output, at least with both outputs enabled at once, which makes sense. Otherwise you can disable TV Out, that'll put it into 60Hz mode when going through VGA alone. And while Inbos has the core programs, it's still an uber-simplified 3.1 experience, and many expected bits just aren't here. Like it's missing the full control panel, you've no access to drivers or Windows setup, you can't customize aesthetics, can't make your own program groups, there aren't even any screensavers. But you can run Windows 3.1 applications outside of those it comes with, provided they don't require any software or libraries that it doesn't like. So things like SimCity and Lemmings for Windows don't run for me at all, but the likes of SkiFree and Jezball are just fine. Speaking of other software, as I've said there's no hard drive inside, despite all the stuff on here. So what's up? Well it's relying on a combo of flash memory, read-only memory, and a RAM drive, all of which are custom stacker partitions. The C drive is the only one you can permanently write to, with roughly 3.5 megabytes of compressed flash storage available. There is an internal IDE header, but exceedingly little room inside the case, so even a flashcard interface would be tight. The largest chunk of storage in the WebIt is the D drive, a 16 megabyte ROM permanently filled with the operating system and all of its bundled applications. Finally, the E drive is a simple RAM disk, making use of a couple megs of main system memory. This is temporary storage that's cleared on every reboot, and it's used for shadowing certain files on the D drive, which is how it deals with that drive being read-only. It makes writable shadowed duplicates for settings files. Even then, you're still largely stuck with what's in ROM, since by default the WebIt does not allow booting from either floppy disk or external drives. Which is too bad, since the PC DOS side is mighty limited in terms of conventional memory, with only around 400 to 450K free due to the drivers and software forced to load from ROM on startup. And that's after modifying the autoexec file to clean things up. Config Sys is locked off, and the ROM DOS installed doesn't include an expanded memory manager. Still, games that have their own memory manager will play just fine, with SVGA support from the 1MB CyberPro 2010 graphics, and full Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 support from the Aztec Sound Galaxy chip inside. ["Aztec Sound Galaxy 2.0!" sound effects from the PC DOS side of things.] And that's just the PC side of things. This is also a Commodore 64. So, press the chicken lips key plus F8, or tap the C64 shortcut in the OS, and that brings up the classic blue C64 BASIC prompt, ready for input. Through software, anyway. Because this is nothing more than an emulator running in DOS, specifically CCS-64, which has been around since 1995. It's a version from 1998, so compatibility isn't the best and it's missing a slew of later updates and fixes, but still. It fulfills the promise of the WebIt Internet Computer also being Commodore 64-compatible. To a degree, technically. It looks great on a CRT, but man is this not a well-fleshed-out emulator. I mean, it's doing what it can in DOS on hardware of this time, but it obviously needed a lot more work still, and let's just be honest, the hardware itself is not really up to snuff. ["Aztec Sound Galaxy 2.0!" sound effects from the PC DOS side of things.] And of course, it doesn't come with any software. You've gotta provide things like TAP, CRT, or D64 files yourself to load from virtual cassettes, cartridges, or floppies. But web computers themselves encouraged finding such things, quote, "...on the Internet." So hey, isn't it convenient? It's an Internet computer! Oh, and this set of shortcuts it came with is amusing, check this out. These allow you to quickly load C64 programs from the two PC card slots or the 3.5-inch diskette drive. So that makes me wonder, do they expect you to write these yourself? Or did they plan on selling game compilations? Like, look at those Commodore logos on the cards! How cool would it be to have officially licensed PCMCIA memory cards full of C64 games? I have no evidence that was their plan, but I can dream. And well, I can dream about a whole lot of things being better, or at least different with the web computer's Internet computer. For all its quirky mashups of 1990s ideas and technology, in the end it's a highly compromised machine that doesn't excel at being a Commodore 64 or a PC. Don't get me wrong, that's what makes it fascinating. But it's also a shame, especially on the PC side, cuz it's real close to being a sweet slimline DOS rig if it weren't for... the way it is. The inability to fully, easily bypass the built-in ROM means the OS is just what it is and conventional memory management sucks. There's no way to access the BIOS that I can find, and there's no mention of it in the manual. And there's some awful two-key rollover, affecting the arrow keys in particular, which, yikes, that's bad for a lot of games. And with nowhere to plug in a PS2 keyboard, eh, oh well, right? At the same time though, internally it's no slouch. Slow by 1999 standards, yes, and I'd bet it chugged online as websites were becoming more complex. But I'd choose to think of it as solid by 1993 standards, when the hardware inside would've been less obsolete. And for what it cost back in 1999, that's an acceptable tradeoff. The C64 side of things is lackluster, no question about that, but for the DOS side the sound and graphics are actually decent. Its 16 megs of RAM is plenty for DOS games, and it's upgradable to 32. And the AMD Elan SC400 inside is clocked at 66MHz with a 33MHz bus, putting performance roughly in the range of a 66MHz Intel 486DX2. All good stuff for DOS. And web computers actively tried to cultivate a community around it, with a webpage called the Webbit Chatbase. Though they quickly found out that the internet was the internet, closing it down before long due to the disturbing contents of the chatbase. Heh heh, a tale as old as time. The company also released an English model in the UK in really limited numbers, I've only ever seen one of them online. They even planned a Windows CE-based successor, but while it appeared at trade shows the product was DOA and web computers fizzled out and shut down around the end of 2000. And the Commodore license went on to be acquired and given up and reacquired again who knows how many times. Yeah, I find this whole darn system and the surrounding circumstances downright captivating. And the unusual feature set and limitations of the Webbit computer itself really make it stand out from the vintage crowd, for better and worse. It's a mess of things that I appreciate, and I hope you enjoyed this look at it with me. ["When You Wish Upon A Star"] So hey, if you had one of these back in the day, or perhaps even modified it to run another OS, let me know your experiences in the comments. And if you like this type of thing then stick around, new LGR videos are always coming soon. And as usual, thanks for watching!