The Husky Hawk has inherited the very solid case of the Hunter. The screen was well protected with a thick layer of plastic and all the ports had protective coverings. However, it was not designed to take the rough treatment that the Husky could endure. For example, it could not being used in the rain.
The chicklet keyboard featured a numeric and arrow key keypad. However, Husky could produce 'cut down' versions dedicated to particular applications.
Several peripheral could be connected to the Hawk.
The Sidebox was designed to be used on the move and was powered by Hawk's internal batteries. It was firmly locked to the Bus expansion and accepted a portable 1200 baud modem, an analogue to digital converter, RAM and ROM disk expansions and a Parallel interface.
The 'Homebase' expansion required a mains supply and automatically connected the Hawk to a 2400 baud modem and charger whenever it was placed on it.
A 3.5" disc drive unit called Oracle (made in Japan by Brother) and a bar-code reader also could be connected to the mini-DIN serial port.
The DEMOS operating system (for Disk EMulation Operating System) was a very compatible extended version of CP/M 2.2. All standard CP/M software - WordStar, CalcStar, Mbasic... - ran without problems. To overcome standard CP/M 80 column screen output, Husky used a 40 X 8 virtual window on a full size 80 x 25 screen.
For custom application writers, Husky also provided a special version of Locomotive BASIC, a superset of Microsoft BASIC, also well known of Amstrad users. This version took advantage of the special facilities of the Hawk: graphics handling, both serial and infra-red ports, bar-code reader and file management using physical or virtual RAM and ROM disks.
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I was part of the original team who built the Husky Hawk! I remember there were about 8 of us in the whole dept. who built and tested these lovely machines. Wow I really loved that machine - at the time it was soooo far ahead of any other handheld computer.
Monday 17th September 2007
Mark (Wales)
To GPSLVR and anyone else interested. I''ve just managed to bring my own Hawk back to life which had got itself into what sounds like a similar state to yours. In my case I had to rebuild the battery pack since the original cells were in a terrible state. One had a hole in the side and there were crystals of dried electrolyte all over the inside of the pack and a few in the body of the Hawk. I remade the pack with four AA NiMH cells, which are the same length as the originals but narrower, I used the temp sensor / cutout thing (not sure exactly what it is) from the original pack, it was slightly corroded by otherwise intact. The resulting pack is somewhat messy compared to the original but does seem to work. Weirdly the secret to getting the Hawk to wake up was in the sequence the various bits were connected up. It was the opposite of what I would have expected. It only seemed to wake up if I connected the battery pack before I connected the ribbon cable to the memory expansion board fitted in the back cover. Really weird. It also made it very difficult to assemble. The charging power connector which has really short leads was very hard to plug in just behind the, already connected, battery pack connector. You know it''s up and running if the red LED comes on when you connect the charger. If you''ve never unplugged the memory expansion cable before make sure you note exactly where it goes because confusingly it has 4 less pins than there are holes in the socket so you can plug it in wrongly very easily. The two pin connectors that bring in the charging power and connect the little speaker are also booby trapped in that there are more pins on the board and you have to note exactly which pins they go on (and the polarity in the case of the charging power one).
I developed the BIOS and ported MS-DOS 3.21 onto this platform. It was as I remember the first hand held MD-DOS compatible computer reviewed in the April 1988 issue of Personal Computer World.
I would love to see if I can pick one up from some where!
(If you have one and run the DEBUG, try dumping memory at F000:000 - then check the text portion of the dump $-)
Monday 1st October 2018
N. Cowie
NAME
Hawk
MANUFACTURER
Husky Computers Limited
TYPE
Professional Computer
ORIGIN
United Kingdom
YEAR
1987
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
None
KEYBOARD
68 key with numeric/arrows keypad
CPU
HD64B180 CMOS enhanced version of the Z80
SPEED
6.144 MHz
RAM
352 KB Battery backed
ROM
96 KB + 32 KB space for user applications
TEXT MODES
40 chars. x 8 lines backlight LCD screen
GRAPHIC MODES
240 x 64 dots
COLORS
Monochrome
SOUND
Beeper (4 octaves)
SIZE / WEIGHT
21.6 (W) x 15.25 (D) x 2 (H) cm / 0.8 Kg
I/O PORTS
2xSerial ports (1xDB25, 1xMini-DIN), 37 pin bus extension, Infra-red transmitter
BUILT IN MEDIA
Battery backet RAM disk
OS
DEMOS - CP/M 2.2 compatible
POWER SUPPLY
Nickel-cadmium battery - 35 hours autonomy
PERIPHERALS
Modem, A/D converter, RAM/ROM extensions, bar-code reader, floppy disc unit