 I have a new computer. This is a Scion 3A organizer from about 1995. It is a 8088 based machine with this model 256k of RAM. It's one of the rare Intel architecture machines that doesn't run DOS. It's got a simple but very effective multitasking operating system with a bunch of different productivity apps including a word processor, spreadsheet etc. Including a find it, including a complete integrated development kit for writing your own programs. Which was quite unusual in those days and quite unusual these days either sadly. Now I actually have two of these. The one on the left is the 256k model. The one on the right is the one megabyte model. And as you might be able to tell the one megabyte model has a little problem with the screen. Start up the processor. You can see only the top half works. Now I'd much rather have a working one megabyte model than 256k model. And these things use essentially the same screen. So what I'm going to try to do today is to swap the screen from this machine onto this machine and vice versa. So I get a working one megabyte one and a non working 256k one. And this will be a little bit of an adventure because these things were notoriously interestingly put together. Anyway let's start with the one megabyte model because it's actually broken. So I'll put this one aside. So this one used to belong to somebody. It's labeled it's Pride 2 and then a code. Who knows? It is mine now. So the first thing is to remove the batteries. These things would run off a couple of double A's for double-jittage hours. And of course being double A's they're easy to find easy to charge. I do not believe you could actually recharge them in the machine itself. It did have a main socket. The other thing we need to remove is the backup battery. These machines largely predated, that came up very effectively, these machines largely predated flashed. So this has battery back ram rather than anything non volatile. And okay let's start removing some of the obvious screws and seeing what happens. Now there's two ways I can do this. One is to remove the front panel of the screen and then take the LCD off and replace it like that. And the other is to replace the entire lid assembly. Now it would be easier given these things notoriously interesting hinges. You can see the rather elegant engineering there. It would be easier to remove the screen. However, that ribbon cable here, I don't know whether it's got a plug on the screen end. So if I were to get the screen out and realize that I can't actually unplug it, that won't help much. So I'm actually going to do some general purpose disassembly first. So let's try removing this. These machines were much beloved and you can still find them now and again in pupils pockets these days. They were designed to be usable of anything else. So the fairly low grade specs didn't really matter. And their productivity suites, the onboard software it was excellent as well as having the ability to write your own programs and it was a first class development environment you could write the same sort of apps that the native programs were yourself on one of these. It meant there was a flourishing ecosystem of the third party software. It was so successful that Sion actually had quite a lot of trouble getting people to upgrade to new models, which is one reason why Sion is no longer with us. That battery plug needs to come out. That I will need. My trusty bent nose pliers, tougher than it should be. I'd rather not break anything you see. So what's this giving us? Not a lot, but you can see more of the details of the hinge mechanism and I can actually see inside to the motherboard here and there is a plug that end. If there's a plug this end, I cannot honestly see one. So the question here is, do I start removing this panel? Because to get at the screen you have to peel this thing off. Or do I go for the back? One thing I'm rather dreading is I will remove the wrong screw and the entire hinge mechanism will go pings, brings all the screws will go everywhere. I'll probably never get it back together. Let's try the back panel. Yeah, bigger screwdriver. That one. I never actually had one of these back in the day. I was a Acorn fan boy and Acorn did actually produce their own branded models of these. So I knew of them but I never owned one. I'd probably have liked it quite a lot. The ability to write their own program on the go has appealed to me. This, by the way, is the warranty void if removed sticker. I reckon the warranty in this machine is now where I'm shooting. Go on. It's the wrong kind of screwdriver. Although I grew up on BBC Basic and the built-in language called OPL was basic like but I never really liked it much. It's perfectly functional. You can write decent apps on it. So don't lose them. What have we got? Not much really. Ah, that's removing the keyboard. So I need my trusty and that makes the keyboard come out. It looks like a rubber mat to me. It does not look like it's going to come out easily. I think there's another piece as you see. I also think it might not be helping me because I'm still going to have to do these blasted hinges in order to get the thing out to get the lid off. Do I need to remove the button bar first? I did look for like instructions online. Couldn't find any. These two panels here are for the Solid State Storage. Not SD cards. They came out about the same year as this did. It was its own proprietary format. It was actually, the cards were intelligent and they had their own microcontrollers and they spoke the same networking protocol that the device itself used to talk to the outside world via this terrible little connector here. I really don't know what they were thinking there. So you can in fact take one of the SD cards with a simple adapter and plug it into the thing that you use to connect these to a PC and then the PC accesses the card as if it was a scion. It's very neat. Naturally they are dead and gone today. No one knows the details of the protocols or anything. There's very little technical information on these. Yeah, I don't think that's helped. So let's put these back together. Go back together. I'm not even happy. This is why I started the broken one. You see, these clips should clip on. Why aren't they clipping? Very simple. Just needed more force. Okay, all right. That doesn't seem to work very well. So now I want to know whether it's possible to remove from the screen side. See, this is the sticky label that forms the front panel to the LCD. I'm going to make a wild guess that there is in fact a plug in there. So let's just try going into the front. This is going to be I don't really want to bend the bend or distort this sticky thing that has to peel off. Lude stuff. Why do people glue stuff? Let's just have a nice straightforward set of clips. And then this is working either. Moving the hinge assembly might be the way to go. I can probably peel that off. I think I just wreck it beyond repair. So there's a couple of screws here. I wonder what they do. Of course, we have to do this all again with the other one. They were designed to be repairable, but I found people online who take in this 256k model and actually soldered on surface mount ram chips. I think a bit. I think the person who described doing that did not actually end up with a working Psyon 3. So that's probably not a recommendation. Now what did that do? Still of the opinion now that actually going through the keyboard is the way to go. So why weren't keyboard coming loose here? Let's give this another go. That unclips easily enough. So is it hooked into something? That was easy. It was the bottom bar here. This thing has these four screws which hold the bottom bar flat. Without the screws it's bendy and it was catching the top of the keyboard grill. So this is the keyboard rather than that. Underneath is the main board which is not screwed on with anything, which is interesting. So it should just lift up with the force it does and the other side has got, oh this is not the main board. This is just the keyboard. There's a connector here. Is that pulled out? I think it's going on in there. It's connected to that weird connector here. But it must fasten down to the main PCB somewhere. There must be a connection. I think that's in here. There's a, ah no this is the main board. There's a plug here onto this board at the bottom. That's how it connects on right. Well I can see the bottom of the LCD and yes there are plugs so I can get that off here. So I technically don't even have to remove this. I want to. I can see there's a hole in the PCB just in there and a spring hooks through it. Spring R. It's the spring that holds this connector on. Right well that's going to be small. Here are the two RAM chips. This is where the other two RAM chips would go. Main board for the one megabyte model will have more stuff on it. And I think I've just solved my problem. I don't need to disassemble any more than this. All I need to do is to replace the main board. The, I can keep the, hang on this is the one megabyte version. So what are these two for? I can reswap the main boards and swap the keyboard skins because these have the all important one megabyte RAM label and I don't need to touch anything else. All right that is worth knowing. So let's put all these things aside because these are all belong to one machine. And then let's tackle the other one. I don't know. We do all the same things. Remove battery. Now that I know slightly more what I'm doing let's just try diving in the keyboard. I'll remove the battery first because it's possible I don't need to do any of the other stuff. It's a very energetic spring on that thing. I would love to stick this onto something more deserving. There's a security label. It's designed not to come off. So that is captured the screen quite nicely. So it's the same model of keyboard. There are apparently two. Here is our PCB which is unplugged from the screen nicely. I have a curve which I'm not expecting. Oh that's the battery connector. I forgot I unplugged that on the other one. That's actually a good reason to go to the back of this. Okay right. So this is all the stuff from the 256k model. Right. This is all working. So let us insert the motherboard from the one makes version. Oh dear. Should have been attached to the board. Let's insert this into our donor machine. That means that it's the right way up. Yes actually. This horrible sprung thing is horrible and sprung. So that goes in here. It's going to be a... What holds this together? Luck? Let's plug in the battery connector for that. Like so. Not too hard. This very delicately gets forced crudely. Very little is known about these machines when it comes to hardware. So you can't emulate one. Nobody knows how they work. It's all custom chips. The core of this thing is... Actually I can show you on this board. The core of this thing is this enormous unit which is a custom Sion ASIC. I think it's even got the processor in it. Could be wrong. I don't see anything else that looks like a processor. And it's a huge chip full of all kinds of custom logic and it's got all the hardware access stuff and memory management unit. And there we go. And it's just a mystery. I've seen a little bit of reverse engineering online but not much. So if you want to use one of these you kind of have to do it with real hardware. That seems suspiciously easy. Stick some batteries in it and see what happens. To turn it on you need a keyboard. Because the battery's been out all of its memories wiped. So what comes out? Fantastic. We have a full screen. Oh I'm in the... I'm in the contacts app. Memory. Free 871k. Brilliant. Okay let's turn this off. Take the batteries out again and quickly put it back together before I rake something. Firstly you clip on the keyboard and it needs to be the right one. This is the one megabyte version. So this has to hook underneath the hinges. Board membrane goes underneath. Now it clips together. Now we know the secret is brute force. That's easy. So I would demonstrate doing something interesting with one of these. But I'm actually still missing... I don't have any of the specialist adapters needed to plug them into modern hardware. Or a memory card for that matter. So doing something with documents is always fiddly. Plus, oh come on what's wrong with this thing? Plus these machines are actually a little bit too modern to be interesting to program for. I mean OPL is a interesting if slightly weird language. Ah what's going from here is it's this captive screw. So that's in fact... yeah there we go. Now that the lids open the screw pushes up when I push the keyboard. So let's just rip off this stupid label that disintegrating around me. So yeah I mean what could I do on this? I could write documents using the built-in apps. Which is interesting enough I suppose. Try to write a simple game in OPL. It's not that exciting. Backup battery, those lids, real batteries and make sure it still works. One thing I have been looking forward to with this one. Now the backup battery is still dead. I'm assuming I put it in the right way up. One thing I have been looking forward to is that this this model has some extra programs. It has a bigger ROM than the 256k which includes this patience application for all your solid-air needs. No idea what to do with jokers which I haven't actually had a chance to play with. Oops down the face. It advertises here 16-bit CPU multitasking digital audio system which was to be fair quite novel back then. This is not a version of patience I know. I've no idea how that works. And never mind. Just take that back up battery. Yeah this is the right way up. It must just be flat. It'd be years old. And let's start putting this one back together again. Now while it's apart have a quick look at what's left. So underneath this shield there should actually be very cool. So just this one board here this has got connectors for the LCD on it and I can just see underneath there a speaker for the digital audio system. So I wonder what's underneath the shield. As far as I know the tape doesn't feel like there's anything in there. I do see a couple of connectors here and here. It's a sticky security label. Oh it's the connectors for the card slots. Right card sliding here. They are huge. It would actually be entirely feasible to build a SD card adapter. You could fit a complete SD card in one of these things. I mean not a micro SD card an old fashioned SD card. These things are kind of enormous. But that is out of scope for this ironing plastic. Why didn't they just use an ordinary connector? It's only six pins I haven't seen. They're designing their own. I mean this is just based on a motherboard header. It's just cheapest everything. Though now I think of it back then there weren't very many bespoke connectors. Bespoke multi-pin connectors. It was before USB. So the alternatives would have been something like a desocket like an old fashioned serial port or motherboard or video, EGA video. So maybe there just wasn't anything else. That's why they built their own. That plugs back on. Very nice satisfying action the way it flips on to the internal socket. There's a hidden button which you access by pressing this. That must be a reset switch. Play with that. First I need to put this back on which involves lugging this in here. I re-hook the wire. Apparently OPL, the built-in programming language in these things is now open source. So given that it was designed for these PDAs, I wonder whether it might be a reasonable fit for Android. Of course the keyboards on these were dramatically better than anything on a modern phone. This pushes onto the keyboard here. That will not in fact do well until I put this on. There's nothing for it to screw into. And there are two more black screws left and these go, oh, I'm an idiot. These go into the lid and they're inside here so I have to remove this again. After the various Scion 3s, Scion produced the five which was the first modern Epoch device. Epoch later turned into Symbian and for a while it ruled mobile phones as the operating system that everyone used. They rewrote the OS that these things run entirely and adopted this new processor from ARM. And those machines are very, very well thought of. They're about the same size as one of these 3s, maybe a little bit bigger, with an even nicer keyboard. And the keyboard on these 3s is not bad in any way. It's small but very, very effective. And combine that with a faster 32-bit processor and a more sophisticated operating system, stuff like pre-emptive multitasking. I think I've stripped that thread, never mind. The five was really the machine that made everyone sit up and take notice of Scion. In some ways it was also the machine that killed them as people bought a Scion 5 and then didn't buy anything else. I have a five which at some point I'll get out and demonstrate. I also have one of the five successors, the Scion netbook. The netbook was the original netbook. This is the one that coined the name. Scion were extremely unhappy when the name became generic for any small notebook machine. The Scion netbook ran Epoch. It was another ARM-based machine. It had a full-size keyboard, a small but excellent screen. It was a good machine in many ways. 32 megabytes of RAM ran Epoch and it didn't have any Wi-Fi or anything. All these machines predate the internet. There's not a lot you can do with it these days, which is a real shame. I like it a great deal to do this boot. I can see the screen is divided into two. The bottom is not working. Hello, anyone? Let's now push the mysterious button and see what happens. It went blank. It's a hardware off button. That's all it is. If your machine goes nuts and stops responding to the normal off sequence, which is function one, then you can push that and machine shuts down. Useful to know. It's probably even in the manual, which I actually have somewhere. No, you can't run Linux on one of these. You can run Linux on the five, big brother, and you can certainly run it on the seven. I did for a while, but it's only got 32 megabytes of RAM and you're not really going to get anything useful done in that. I wrote on it for a while using a simple text editor, but it wasn't really a success. Also, it's not a touchscreen. Now that's interesting. The bottom half of the screen is flickering on. I put pressure on the board. It shouldn't really be working with this one. It's turned on, but that was really interesting to notice. There we go. It's not doing it anymore because that suggests that whatever's wrong with the screen is fixable. I'll put in our screws because if I can turn this into, instead of one functional, one non-functional machine, if I can turn that into two functional machines, that'd be awesome. Yeah, all communication with the outside world for these things was through the proprietary connector. Later ones had infrared. I don't think any of these ever had Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi was still very much in its infancy even in the very, very later days of the five. And while my netbook, if you have the right add-on card, does support Wi-Fi, it doesn't actually support any useful encryption standards. So it's like wet. I wouldn't wish wet in any one. I'll put that aside and check the good one out again. I'm sure it still works. Yep. Oh, the world map. Can I just tell it where I am? It's home to Zuri. Right, Zuri here. Zero miles away. Useful to know. I have relatives who live in Cairns. If I type in, doesn't know Cairns. Won't be to go to Cairo instead. Things flashing there. Brisbane is 10,082 miles away. Miles, miles. Change distance units to kilometres. 16,226 kilometres. Good to know. Also the time is apparently 1705 there, which I suspect is wrong. That's a system. Main battery is a good backup battery needs replacing not an external power. Now, I'd better set the clock through the time app, which is here. And it thinks it is 427pm. My trusty pebble thinks it's 1555. So time and date. There you go. Won't let me type in 15. Even early MS-DOS would do that. And it is the 7th of October. It's not 1993. It is 2018. Okay. Is that the 7th of October or is that the 10th of July? It's the 10th of July. The first one is the month. 1007 2018. Right. I can change that. If I go to menu, I can then go down to the hit formats. Date format. Months of the year. Date of the year. Year of the month day. It's hyphen, the way the gods intended. 24 hours, the way the gods intended. There we go. Still thinks it's 1255. 15. Right. That's more correct. The calculator is 4. It's good to have confirmation of these things. For the processor, the board is small. You're not going to touch type on this. You notice I have not typing a file name. It just remembers. I can name stuff later if I want to. Spreadsheets. Yes. 24. So you get these shortcut buttons to specific applications or system will take you to the system application where you can browse the actual menus. Some of these are in bold because those are applications that are currently running. It is a multitasking off the system. Go back to the word processor, menu to the internal disk system. You see I now have a named document there. Data is not the file manager. That's just a card app. It may not be a file manager. I think you're supposed to manage files through the applications here. So if I want to find my document, I can just go down here to test and reload it. Reload it in this case. I can create a new document. Right. It doesn't like file names to the spaces in. I'll just call that another active system. So I have two documents loaded. I go to test, go to another. The application itself will only squat one at a time, but it will seamlessly switch between them. Yeah. It's a nice system. Everything's workable through control hotkeys. So once you get used to it, it's very fast. Yeah. Anyway, I need to figure out the rules for this probably in the manual somewhere. That'll be a while. Anyway, now have a working sound three and a mostly working sound three. Hope you enjoyed this.