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Unitron U-20 Series 286 PC Clone (around 1989)

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First post, by IkeFox

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Here is another piece of hardware I couldn't find any information about online. It appears to be a 286 PC clone from Unitron, also known for their Apple II clones.
It's a nice compact machine, with VGA and IDE onboard, support for up to two 3 1/2 FDDs judging by the cabling and spare drive bay, and two 16-bit ISA slots.

Unfortunately the leaked battery has damaged the mainboard and the PC doesn't boot, even though the fan starts spinning, and front LEDs light up. The FDD and HDD are still working, as tested in another PC.

Thought I'd share some pictures to document this PC. Other than that I don't really have more information on this hardware. Right now I only took pictures of the disassembled unit. Will add more pictures later on.

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Reply 1 of 4, by Horun

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Interesting.Most of the chips are 1991 so a bit newer than 1989. Odd shape 😀

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 2 of 4, by IkeFox

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Here are some more pictures of the interior and case.
IDE HDD and FDD are typical PC hardware for the time, nothing too fancy.

The whole machine is pretty easy to disassemble and put back together, except for the front LEDs. The LED cables really get in the way when you want to remove the mainboard, and the LEDs are hot-glued into place, so it's not possible to simply reattach them.

Keyboard connector on the front looks like a standard PS/2 connector. On the back there are parallel, serial and VGA connectors. Came without any peripherals or documentation.

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Reply 3 of 4, by rasz_pl

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Neat little system. There are visible missing vias near the battery, you will have to scrape scrape to bear copper and stuff wires thru damaged vias to rebuild missing links .

Open Source AT&T Globalyst/NCR/FIC 486-GAC-2 proprietary Cache Module reproduction

Reply 4 of 4, by IkeFox

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I sent the device to a repair shop, they rewired the missing traces and replaced the battery, and the PC is now working again 😀
Here is a picture of the boot screen. The floppy drive and keyboard are detected as well, but I haven't done any further testing so far.
The BIOS setup looks like what you'd expect of a typical 286 BIOS, nothing too fancy here. I like the progress bar when scanning the RAM at POST, though. It looks like the maximum RAM would be 2 MB. I wouldn't risk swapping the modules however since the mainboard has these old-style plastic retention clips that tend to break easily -_-

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