Datavan Book-size LAN station

Datavan is a company which makes computer hardware for networks and POS systems. This machine, manufactured in early 1990s, is a complete 386SX-based PC in a small casing. Its size is similar to a thick A4 book. It was manufactured as station for working in a network, so it has one ISA slot for network adapter. Most controllers: Floppy drive, ATA, serial and parallel ports, are integrated in mainboard. There are 4 30-pin SIMM slots for memory expansion. Everything is powered from a small switching-mode power supply unit with a fan.

Manufacturer Datavan

Origin ?
Year of unit 1992
Year of introduction ?
Class AT
CPU Intel 80386SX
Speed 25MHz
RAM 4MB (4x SIMM30)
ROM AMI BIOS
Graphics Realtek RTG3106 VGA (1MB)
On board
Sound PC Speaker
System expansion bus 1 16-bit ISA slot with riser
Floppy/removable media drives 1x low-profile 3.5" floppy disk drive
 
 

Hard disk: 1x Quantum ProDrive ELS 80MB IDE disk drive (C/H/S: 977/10/17)

Peripherals in collection:
 - None
Other boards:

 

 1x 8-bit ISA unidentified network adapter, ca. 1992. Supports AUI and BNC. ROM doesn't start.
Non-standard expansions: Game port, 2x serial and 1x parallel port controllers on mainboard.
Operating system(s): MS-DOS 5.0, Windows 3.11

I bought my unit in a flea market. It had no floppy disk drive, but its cut-out in front panel was enlarged to fit a full-profile one, not a low-profile as was by default. I replaced it with low-profile floppy disk drive and cut a new front bezel for it.
The network adapter based on DP8390DN chip is unknown, even TH99 has no information about it. It has a ROM, but doesn't boot it. Windows 3.11 hangs fatally while detecting it, so probably it is there but requires some special configuration or software.

I also had to rework soldered-in DS1287 as its battery was drained out.

Contents: Starting, usage Configuration Links

Starting

The computer starts normally, but its BIOS is oriented more towards network terminal than PC. So there are some complications when using it as machine booting from hard disk. It is needed to know some things, at least for my BIOS version:

1. Machine will not boot DOS 6.22 from hard disk. It will install it from floppy, but not boot. It will give clueless information on screen and then hang. Informations are like "partition table" (not "partition table bad" or "invalid partition table" - just "partition table") or "MSDOS$$$$$$$$". However there are no problems with DOS 5.0 and it can be installed without problems. There is a nice DOS 5.0 single 1.44MB install floppy, it works well.

2. To make hard drive usable and detectable (by DOS) at all, it is needed to make few BIOS changes:
     - "Hard disk Type 47 RAM area" to "0:300"
     - "Fast I/O Speed Option" to "Disabled"

There is a driver for Windows 3.x for graphics chip in fileland. It was tested and works in 800x600x256 - I couldn't get it to nice operation in 800x600x16-bit, always gradient in Windows setup looked strange.

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Configuration

There is a set of jumpers in mainboard, right behind hard disk compartment. They are responsible for serial/parallel ports as when I moved one I got LPT2 instead of 1, but I haven't analysed it.

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Links:

I wish I could supply some links... well,
 - http://www.datavan.com.tw/ - Datavan company site - nothing about this computer, but worth mentioning.


 

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