How My Kalidor Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Windows 95.

By Andy Carra, with help from Dan DeMaggio, and Robert Christensen.
This article was originally composed for Pen Computing Magazine, and modified by the author to a technical document for the web
Any problem/questions/non-insulting remarks/issues of responsibility (we take none for anything you do based upon this article) to Andy Carra

We like pen-based computers. Onsale.com was selling them for two-hundred-and-some dollars. We bought four.

Kalidor 2100s are really cool. Instead of fragile plastic shells, unreadable displays, and hardware no-one else uses, these are a hacker's dream. The Kalidor is a grey rubber brick with a glowing "etch-a-sketch"(tm?) screen, and real serial/IR/mini-parallel ports sticking out of the back. It uses a 486-25 processor (by Texas Instruments?), and comes complete with Windows 3.1 and Pen Extensions 1.0 installed. You can't buy these machines anymore, but I understand that the 2100s progeny, the 2500 is still for sale in Japan.

Pen Extensions 1.0 only runs under Windows 3.1, but it's quite a nice suite. The handwriting recognition is trainable for any word, and there are some really neat tools. The major disadvantage to PE 1.0 is that it only runs under W3.1; Windows 95's setup actually demands that you remove them in order to complete the installation (and don't think we didn't try to work around this). Obviously, W3.1 doesn't have a number of features that discriminating geeks want: 32-bit applications, (decent) integrated networking up-to-date programming tools. While Microsoft did create Pen Extensions 2.0 for Windows 95, they only distributed it to OEMs and on beta versions of the OS. This may be hard to come by for people who aren't developers, but remember, a number of OEMs do distribute PE2.0 with their pen-based computers. NOTE: PE2.0 won't have a lot of the cool functions which you've grown used to in PE1 (most notably, gesture support). If you can't live without them, don't do this.

Upon receiving our K2100s, we promptly decided that we wanted W95/PE2.0 to run on them, but there were a few hitches:

We tried the obvious answers first; we navigated ALPS phone network for a few hours, until we found a Kalidor tech support voice mailbox. After leaving an e-mail address, we heard back the same day from Robert. He explained that the 2100s were never meant to run 95 (and that no-one had tried, to the best of his knowledge), but he could send us some drivers and registry entries, if we really wanted to goof with our machines. Above and beyond the call of duty, Robert mailed us some files and gave us lots of advice about the internals of the 2100.

Using these files, we tried to install Windows 95 (OSR2, the secret OEM version) from a parallel Zip(tm?) drive to the Kalidors 170 MB PCMCIA Viper HD (it just fits), but found that at several points during the installation, a keyboard is required. We tried creating a setup script for W95, but learned that OSR2 doesn't use the same serial number tag as in the original setup scripts. Since the K2100 has no keyboard jack (all editing must take place over a bios-supported serial link), we were out of luck.

Undeterred, we physically tore apart our Kalidors (there is a neat way to do this, we could tell you, but then...), removing the PCMCIA hard drive and inserting it into a machine with a fresh W95 install (all standard device drivers), and using the arcane phrase "xcopy32 /s /h /e /r /c /k /q " to copy an exact system image under W95 while it was running. Lo and behold, upon re-inserting the drives, they almost booted! We disabled APM (the Kalidor power management is a little... different), and tried again: it worked! We were in W95! But, of course, we needed to use a serial mouse to navigate, with no keyboard and no tablet support.

Upon installing the drivers Robert had sent us, we were disappointed to find that we still couldn't use the pen as a mouse, no matter what we tried. We were sure the tablet was working, and that drivers were correctly installed; what was the problem? We poked around for a while and came upon the idea that perhaps the pen mouse drivers didn't actually work as a mouse and only interacted with pen services; we were right... after installing PE2.0 on our fresh W95 machine and re-copying the files to the Kalidor's drive, we had pen support. By adding the old Kalidor power management DLL and the flashram driver to the config.sys, we had (almost) complete Windows 95 support.

These are our cult computers, and we love them. While we can't guarantee you that all of what we've written here will work for you, I can say that it worked for us. We wish you the best of luck, and enjoy your Kalidor!

So here are a few links to resources... we're not distributing Kalidor stuff, nor are we affiliated with Kalidor in any way except that we're customers.
I don't know of anyone selling Kalidors currently (so don't ask), and I haven't owned one for about a year now (my old one died), so while I'm happy to try and help, I'm a little out of touch with how to get things working these days.

Last Modified: 1.8.02
Andy Carra