nice one!!!

The system looks really cool! I especially like the motherboard. It looks very complicated and expensive, very different from the Socket 3/4/7/8 motherboards I usually deal with. So many interesting details, too — like the AT/XT markings near every drill hole on the board.

I guess, the maximum RAM for this board would be 2MB? What are the U27, U28, U63 and U64 sockets for?

Also, it's interesting that this board seems to have a lot less jumpers than a Socket 3 or a Socket 7.

jheronimus wrote:

I guess, the maximum RAM for this board would be 2MB? What are the U27, U28, U63 and U64 sockets for?

.

No it supports 4 mbs of RAM by SIPP_30 modules - I removed onboard chips and installed sipps for some time, then changed again, as I have only one set of SIPP_30 units - they are in another AT now.

I love how these 286s use a very similar method for connecting to the motherboard that recent intel CPUs use.

The PCW was a great machine! Granted it was rather slow and monochrome, but it had many CP/M apps.

I have to admit at the time I mostly programmed it and wrote coursework, games were generally adventure based, but it did have Starglider, Batman, Head over Heels etc.

That's not to say it was competitive with a 286, that introduced me to Ultima VI and Fate of Atlantis, but a PC cost much more at the time and didn't include a printer or software.

ynari wrote:

The PCW was a great machine! Granted it was rather slow and monochrome, but it had many CP/M apps.

I have to admit at the time I mostly programmed it and wrote coursework, games were generally adventure based, but it did have Starglider, Batman, Head over Heels etc.

That's not to say it was competitive with a 286, that introduced me to Ultima VI and Fate of Atlantis, but a PC cost much more at the time and didn't include a printer or software.

I see... My father had worked for about 30 years in the Moscow Bureau of the New York Times -from 1986 to last year, when he retired, In 1988 he brought home from the NYT office that Amstrad PCW8512, that was replaced by IBM 5160 with orange glowing screen there...

Yes it's a great machine - very beautiffly made, CP/m compatile, graphic mode, 512k ram by 64k pages... Alas when we bought a pentium-1 in 1995 (which is still here, in working condition), we gave PCW to our friends, who later put it to trash(( Only few diskettes are left from it as souvenirs... Maybe I'll buy another one on ebay one day)

And on what programming languages you used to write on it and what kind of work was it ? I learned only Basic on it - as I was about 10-12 years when I learned it on the PCW... And about Ultima IV - today I began to play it for the first time on that 286)

There's a lot of languages available for the PCW, but mostly I used the free bundled options - so Mallard BASIC, some assembly language both standalone and embedded in BASIC, using the 8080 based assembler/debugger bundled with the PCW. Also a little bit of C once I'd obtained some freeware disks, and of course some playing around with Dr. Logo.

I used it for everything, including desktop publishing, spreadsheets, word processing..

I still have it today, the only problem is its sheer size. I'd love to fit it in my study, but don't have room for the monitor.