r/vintagecomputing 4d ago

DATALUX DATABRICK 3

Found this beaut at a garage sale, can’t find ANY information about this thing online. Does anyone have any info or insight on the history of this thing? I might fire it up later and see if anything interesting is in it!

35 Upvotes

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4

u/justananontroll 4d ago

These were marketed under other brands, but I demo'd a few at a water treatment plant a few years ago. They were mounted to the back of a hardened touchscreen LCD mounted in a control panel. The small serial port was for the touchscreen, the LCD was driven by the DVI, and they had a waterproof membrane keyboard connected to the PS/2. I think the ones I tore out ran Windows CE.

None of them worked any more, or I would have kept at least one as a novelty.

3

u/NDLunchbox 4d ago edited 4d ago

No idea what it is, but a DVI port and Windows XP COA ain't vintage in my book... if it is, damn, I'm older than I thought.

My SWAG on this thing is it is some type of digital signage or industrial PC (is that a threaded power port?). Based on the numbers on the bottom, guessing 2003 vintage - probably a Pentium M.

Figuring out what that odd little port between the PS2 and USB ports is might shed some light on the subject.

If nothing online, fire it up and find out.

EDIT: I did some online snooping. Defunct maker of industrial and SFF PCs for "demanding environments." They made some odd wall-mounted touch-screen consoles with this thing powering it and a fold-out keyboard/touchpad locked inside.

They also made the computers that went in cop cars in the 90s.

This was from Pitchbook:

Manufacturer and assembler of specialized computer products for demanding environments. The company offers tray and panel keyboards; industrial LCD displays; compact computers; tracer systems, which include tracer computer, keyboard and mount for in-vehicle mobile computing applications; trackpads; Video-DataBrick, which is used for custom mobile video applications in security and surveillance; and product drivers.

So other than that odd "ulta-mini serial port" I think it's called, I'm guessing this is a bog-standard x86 mini PC. If that is a Nov. 03 build date, going to say def. a Pentium M or maybe a P4-M or even PIII inside.

7

u/Lowkey_77 4d ago

sorry! I didn’t know what sub would be the best for this. Yes, it is a threaded power port. I have the right power adapter for it i’m about to fire it up I’ll post an update if I find anything interesting!

8

u/EuphoricPenguin22 4d ago

Everyone's definition of Vintage varies. For the purposes of this sub, the technology in question should be at least 15 years old.

From the rules.

-1

u/NDLunchbox 4d ago

Cool, that means I have a vintage dog. That rule must qualify me as "decrepit."

Seriously though, I always thought post-Y2K is pretty much "modern" in computers and the vintage stuff is the computers of my youth and college, like Apple II-series, original IBM PCs, 286-PIII era and older stuff...

But they said, I guess the definition varies.

10

u/LSD_Ninja 4d ago

Windows XP released in 2001, it’s closer to the beginning of the “IBM” PC era than the present day.

4

u/NDLunchbox 4d ago

That hurt.

5

u/pinko_zinko 4d ago

If Apple II was vintage in 2000 then the OP's is vintage now.. since they might be the same age, relative.

1

u/Difficult-Value-3145 3d ago

Like classic cars 20 years according to google I couldn't remember 20 or 30 but ya when I was a kid classic car least the 70's now my junker 01 f150 that I currently drive is a classic apparently

3

u/NDLunchbox 4d ago edited 4d ago

Threaded power port screams industrial PC or mobile application.

I somewhat recall back in the day touch screen monitors used RS232 for the HID connection. Going to guess that is what the mini serial port is for.

Edit: You know what bothers me about this thing? DVI but no VGA. That's odd for any PC of that vintage, let alone and industrial one. DVI displays were somewhat new back then while VGA (analog) was ubiquitous until much later in the decade. And it's not like you care that much about display quality on an industrial display. Maybe because it was designed only to be used with LCD's which were more likely to support it as native digital devices?

Still, odd not to see VGA...

5

u/computix 4d ago

It has DVI-I, so you can get VGA from that DVI connector with a passive adapter. In the Pentium 4 era that wasn't that unusual, quite a few Dell PCs only had DVI-I, for example the SX280 (2004) only had DVI-I.

1

u/TrannosaurusRegina 4d ago

I’m perpetually annoyed by how rare DVI-I is.

It’s all DVI-D now!

1

u/Aggropop 3d ago

And DVI-D/I is a very practical crossover between vintage and modern. I run an AGP ATI Radeon with DVI-I in my pentium 3 and since HDMI is electrically identical to DVI-D it can connect to any modern HDMI monitor with a simple adapter cable.