Hi! Just discovered these forums here: looks like a great place with a minimum of hassles and spam, etc... I'm involved with solar-powered antique laptops in a developping country; they are used for touch typing classes. The app runs on the fdd in needed! Now: beside the fact that antique 8086's are almost impossible to find, even if I'm willing to pay for them (!) many of them don't have a port for an external keyboard. Of course it is much better to learn on a proper full size keyboard! Is there any way at all to connect a keyboard to the serial or parallel port? If a hardware hack is needed, I could implement it... (ps: if not surface mount) But my question is mainly: is there any driver, or whatever, out there, to achieve this? I've googled several times on this, but didn't really get anywhere... Thanks

It would be difficult to directly hook up a standard keyboard to a serial or parallel port and make it work. I know, and I am one of the few people who could do the software and have access to the information necessary to make it work. But I assure you, it would not be worth the effort. You would have dedicate the 8086 processor to the task (using two lines on the parallel port) and would not be able to do much of anything else with the system. But for simple typing and display, it could be made to work on old 8086 class machines. Understand, a normal PC type system has a dedicated microprocessor (an Intel 8040/8042 micro processor) to receive the keyboard signal, convert the data to scan codes and then present it to the system. These are standard devices on older system boards with the complex code to do the job built into them. As for a hardware interface. At one time I had a custom built box that would do what you want. It had an Intel microprocessor that was programmed to receive the keyboard signal, convert it and then send it out as a serial signal. And as late as 15 years ago, I saw such boxes for sell. It would be hard to find any of them now days. Other considerations: If you are trying to work with solar power, standard keyboards could be a problem. They require a +5v source that can provide up to 250ma of current. Any interface box might require almost as much. Standard systems provide up to 1/2 amp of +5v for their keyboard and mouse. And what type of keyboard are you trying to use. The old PC and PC-XT keyboard work differently than the new keyboards in use today. There are two ways you could hack a hardware interface. You could copy the serdies shift register of the original PC/XT, and connect it to a parallel port. Many software problems with that design. Or you could take keyboard processors off of old system boards, and add the required logic and connect it to a parallel port. Again many software interface problems. No, for what you want to do there is really only one clean way to do it. They are hard to find, but there are keyboards sold and that are used on some systems that are designed to connect to a serial port. They are often used in terminals and cash register equipment. They do not work exactly like PC keyboards, but send standard ASCII character codes to a standard serial port, which would be easy for you to work with. Very little software to use them. They are normally compact low power keyboards. Some are able to draw the required power to operate them from the serial interface, but don't count on this. In addition, there are battery powered keyboards that are designed for serial attach and often these are sold as serial attach keyboards for PDA units. They should work for what you want to do. An example KeySync . Search for "PDA Serial Keyboard" or just "serial keyboard" and you will get hundreds of hits to look at. Also search for "terminal keyboard". What you want is a battery operated, full size standard keyboard with serial interface. You might be able to find a local source for such keyboards. Or a local source of old terminal keyboards or workstation keyboards, that you can use.

Thanks a lot JackG. PDA and such keyboards would be too expensive: defeats the purpose. Concerning the terminal keyboards: can I assume they can be had somewhere, and cheap? I do need a special driver, for them, don't I? Not part of DOS files? I didn't realize there was a separate processor to handle the scanning of the keyboard, etc. Is this the same on an old laptop keyboard, and, say, on a dime-a-dozen "101 keyboard"? Could I just wire an extension cable onto the board of a 101 kbd, and the other end inside the laptop, in place of its own small kbd? May be at the level of the switch matrix? A straight hardware hack? (Touching wood ) Thanks again Regards Chriswlan

What kind of power supply do these solar powered machines have? Isn't it easier to use newer laptops/desktops (286/386 or 486) for your purpose or is the solar powering an issue? Maybe you can focus on other solar powering solutions. In general the 286 and newer machines can be found very easily for free (here in Holland; I also have some left;-). What (wordprocessing) software do u use? If no harddisks are used (which decreases the power consumption which is positive for the solar powering I guess) and if lets say 8Mb of RAM is available here are some suggestions of software that can be used on these machines: - OpenDOS 7.01 with WordPerfect 5.1 running from RAM drive. - OpenDOS 7.01 with (minimal) Windows 3.1x using Write as a WYSIWYG word processor (also running from RAM drive)....