The unofficial GeoBook and Super PowerNote Cheat Page

Contents

Remark [added  January 2012]: In a many ways, Brother USA's GeoBook / SuperPowerNote range of notebook computers anticipated the success of "netbooks" by almost a decade when they were released in 1999: they combined a laptop-style form factor with Internet capability and an attempt to significantly reduce the price point through the use of an inexpensive, x86-based hardware design, solid-state disks and and an operating system that was optimized for low resource consumption (PC/GEOS).

As this project hasn't even made it onto Wikipedia yet, I am preserving some of my notes on the internals of the device here - some more details can be found (in German) on the GeosWiki page.

1. Preface
2. Some other GeoBook-related resources (Links, mostly broken)
3. Fundamental techniques
   • Entering DOS mode
   • Recovering from failed experiments
   • Editing the GEOS.INI file
     • Personalizing your GeoBook
   • Invoking the self-running demo
4. Peripherials
   • Connecting a ZIP or JAZ drive
   • Flash Memory Cards
   • Modifying the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files (NB-80C only)
5. Communications
   • Making sure the phone is on-hook
   • Dialing from PBX lines
   • Pulse dialing to an ISP
   • EarthLink setup information
6. The Geobook and other Geos platforms
   • Accessing system files
   • Running applications and Book Reader books on disks
   • Installing new fonts
   • Software for the Desktop versions of Geos usually runs on the GeoBook as well.
   • And finally: Development of applications specifically for the GeoBook can make use of the same tools available to other Geos platforms. (Note that debugging on the actual device is not possible using any of the retail SDKs for Geos because the symbol files are not included. I suggest contacting Brother directly if you are serious about this.)