Sometimes you collect vintage gear without even realizing that it’s vintage gear. Take this LED signboard for example:

Standard retail gear, right? Nothing exciting from a vintage computer guy’s perspective. But hey.. what’s this on the side?

A floppy drive?! And an AT style keyboard connector?! Hmmm… okay, now I’m really curious. Let’s unscrew the back panel and see what’s going on here.

Gadzook! Quite the array of electronics in here! But look over the to left.. is that…

It is! It’s a 386! This signboard is driven by a very scaled down 386 PC! So what’s the story?

In the early 1990s, a company called JVF was offering animated signboards for retail use. According to a gentleman in the know some years back, the deal was you paid $5000 for the sign, and then had to pay JVF a subscription fee on an ongoing basis, with additional fees to change the message on the sign. I was told that you never actually owned the sign – you were just paying for the rights to host and use it, and JVF could take it back. The sign was capable of some pretty fancy animation. Check out this video by one owner:

The sign was ‘booted’ up with an MSDOS disk that contained the drivers for the LED board as well as JVF’s custom software to produce messages. The software was entirely proprietary and the end user could not make any changes without going through JVF first.

Sadly, (or perhaps, understandably) the business model did not work. Sometime in the late 1990s JVF met its demise, leaving signboard owners stranded and unable to change the signboard messages. This was especially problematic if you were a retail outfit using the sign to display things like prices. Over time, the signs were retired and dropped. I got mine from a client – I was curious about the PC inside and thought perhaps someone might one day find a way to edit the sign contents.

Turned out I was right, a group of determined individuals came up with their own sign programming utilities. I actually got my hands on a copy thanks to a guy who went by the handle Mr. Henderson, and managed to edit and use the sign for my business for a while. The new tools didn’t quite enable you to do the kind of fancy animation JVF did, but it at least made the thing usable. As I recall, you had to install the software on a PC running Windows 95 or less. You would then edit the files in the ‘slideshow’ utility and save them to a 720K bootable disk. As I mentioned, the disk was a standard MSDOS disk that called up the slideshow program via an AUTOEXEC.BAT file.

This is mine booting up:

I’m not sure what the purpose of the keyboard port was since DOS does not drive the LED directly. However in the previous video I notice it appears there were some utilities you could use directly on the signboard.

I’d love to figure out how the driver works – I don’t know if it’s possible but it’d be cool to find a way to redirect text and graphics output from the 386 PC inside to the LED directly and actually use it as an oddware vintage PC. I’m imagining my days playing Kings Quest on my father’s IBM Convertible, but in this case, writ large!