And the last picture of the BIOS Screen:

That's a very neat 286!
Almost hard to believe this existed at the same time as the enormous XT PC's with the same (or probably worse) specs.

Nice 12MHz AMD FPU. The 12MHz part was pretty uncommon. Most of them were 10s.

There is something special with pizza box 286 systems 😀

Mine is a bit thicker but it has more or less the same specifications.

bofh.fromhell wrote on 2023-03-18, 14:28:

Almost hard to believe this existed at the same time as the enormous XT PC's with the same (or probably worse) specs.

Well it is a bit newer, it was offered as a budget PC for businesses, I own a hardcopy and pdf of infoworld magazine where it was advertised in, it’s from August 27th, 1990 on pages 58 and 58:

It was advertised in the Netherlands at least at the beginning of 1992:

Edit: well according to some sources, the Tandon 286/n was released in 1989

OSkar000 wrote on 2023-03-18, 20:44:

There is something special with pizza box 286 systems 😀

Yeah I mostly like it because of it size, I can put a monitor or two AT(X) mini towers on top of it, so I got some extra room for my collection 😉

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2023-03-18, 16:10:

Nice 12MHz AMD FPU. The 12MHz part was pretty uncommon. Most of them were 10s.

Yeah, I’m hoping it will keep functioning with my 16MHz AMD or 25MHZ Harris CPU. Otherwise I’ll be looking for a 287XL and hoping that it will work with that one. But ‘m going to get some heatsinks for the FPU and Chipset, just in case.

Just want to see what I can get out of it. Although Wolfenstein 3D is running pretty well, although in a bit reduced screen size, but that works with a bigger monitor 😀

Looking at the ad in the Dutch “Limburgs Dagblad”, it is odd that the Tandon 286/n was more expensive than a Laser 386 and NLG 1000 (about $ 500) more expensive than the Tandon PCA 12 SL…

In the ad from March 31st, 1992, the price is reduced to NLG 1999,-

Random info for you:
The chipset on that motherboard officially supports up to 20mhz 286, but not 25's.
Use the fastest ram you have hopefully 60ns or 70ns since the memory controller sets wait states automatically based on the speed of the bus vs speed of ram.
16mhz needs 100ns ram for 0 wait state read, 1 wait state write. 20mhz needs 70ns ram for same.
Chipset memory controller does not support simms larger than 1mb.
To get the EMS working, I see in the Dell System 210 information, (95% same motherboard, looks like earlier revision of it) that you have to go into the bios and assign some of the extended memory to EMS so the EMS section isnt 0, or EMS cannot work.

Some good info here from Dell, it should apply to yours also:
https://www.dell.com/community/Desktops-Gener … YS/td-p/5116124

Hope this is helpful.

I think the 12MHz AMD has a decent shot at 16MHz. I believe it was the last 80287 developed, so it should use a fairly modern process.
Just try not to ruin it, because as I said, the 12MHz part is not all that common in DIP (I've seen them more often as PQFP44).

I think this Tandon could actually qualify as a "pizza box", as opposed to the low-profile desktops (two 5.25" bays high) that others are claiming as such.