Cool, I didn't know Tom Hanks used VOGONs. (80's Tom Hanks, when he was funny)

I remember being bombarded with the Ambra commercials, but they disappeared rather quickly. I never understood why IBM pushed it when they already had the PS/1 line.
Although they were cheaper, they did have some pretty cool hardware though...using blue lightning CPUs and such. I have a dual P60 board that came out of an Ambra.

Yeah, today I probably look more like Wilson (in Cast Away) 😀

I guess it wasn't a good idea to compete with your own products. And even then, it wasn't like it was a good deal either. I mean, there were certainly both more performant and cheaper machines.
But... I still have a soft spot for it. It's got a unique look to it and pretty compact. Plus it is really well built, and with some upgrades, a decent retro-rig.

Very nice setup and welcome to Vogons. It's quite the fun community here. Tons of information and helpful friendly users.

I think Ambra had a very advanced bezel design for the early 90s. It looked more like early 2000s with the white coloured plastic rather than beige. The floppy labia and power button were also pretty sharp.

I think if I had one of these, I would try to get components with an IBM FRU. I highly recommend Plextor CD-ROM drives with IBM FRU if you can still find them, though given their age they might be more of a decoration than a functional optical drive.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-04-28, 14:08:

Very nice setup and welcome to Vogons. It's quite the fun community here. Tons of information and helpful friendly users.

Thanks! Yes, I've many times ended up here already when searching for retro-PC related stuff!

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2022-04-29, 01:34:

I think Ambra had a very advanced bezel design for the early 90s. It looked more like early 2000s with the white coloured plastic rather than beige. The floppy labia and power button were also pretty sharp.

I think if I had one of these, I would try to get components with an IBM FRU. I highly recommend Plextor CD-ROM drives with IBM FRU if you can still find them, though given their age they might be more of a decoration than a functional optical drive.

I think so too.
I'm not overly concerned about correctness myself. I just want to relive my youth and I would for sure have put anything in that fitted, that I could have gotten my hands on then 😀

I find it interesting that the tower you posted, seem to have another color scheme than my machine. I know they had a few different models during their rather short span, but I can't find much information about Ambra at all when searching the web. The logo is obviously different as well. Was this a US vs. european thing or just that at some point in time they revised it?

The best place to check for information would be in old issues of PC Magazine. I actually preferred PC-World, but I don't think those are available for free online.

I remember looking into Ambras a while back, and I found something that implied either Ambra was sold off to another company, or there was actually another Ambra brand that was completely unrelated to IBMs.

Okay, I found it. Zeos had a computer model named "Ambra", but it's not related to the IBM division which were actually rebadged Acers.

https://techmonitor.ai/technology/zeos_launch … ambra_pc_models

Thanks! Unfortunately, that makes it pretty hard to find information.
Interesting info on Zeos though.

In other news, made another "upgrade" for my Ambra. A DIY SD card extension cable, epoxied to a hacked up random slot cover from the ol' junk pile.
Pretty it is not. But it is trivially reversible and it improves quality of life a lot.

Great idea with the SD card slot.

There will always be a special place in my heart for a proper winchester type hard drive, but sadly they are just not viable long term.
For solid state drives, I've been using compact flash, since they're basically already IDE and only require passive adapters.
Is SD on an old PC a relatively bug free experience?

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-05-05, 13:26:

Great idea with the SD card slot.

Thanks, but it's not really my idea, SD card extensions are apparently pretty common in the 3D printing community.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2022-05-05, 13:32:

There will always be a special place in my heart for a proper winchester type hard drive, but sadly they are just not viable long term.
For solid state drives, I've been using compact flash, since they're basically already IDE and only require passive adapters.
Is SD on an old PC a relatively bug free experience?

Yeah, I've got a CF in my Amiga 1200 😀
But CF are getting harder to find and more expensive, meanwhile SD to IDE adapters have been cloned by... Well, the usual suspects... And thus are really cheap now.
My laptop has a built in SD card adapter, while CF is now more complicated to work with on a modern PC.
So far it has been working awesomely for me.
Some have had issues installing Linux using these adapters. It seems that the firmware really expects the first primary partition to be a FAT partition (at least if it has a DOS partition table, because some use these with success on the Amiga). But if you know about this quirk, Linux should work fine as well if you just make sure to have a small FAT partition first.
I'm sure there are BIOSes that will not play nice with it or other edge cases that can sour the experience, but personally I have only had success. They are cheap enough that, like the gotek, it can't hurt to have a few around.