Thursday, March 4, 2010

The Commodore PC

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Well yesterday I teased about it, and today I got it in! The only released line of computers I had not talked about was Commodore's infamous PC computers.
The PC line started in Germany, without Jack approving it. According to Jack's philosophy," Why buy chips elsewhere, when we make our own?" But (in Germany) it sold really well, so Jack decided to try it out in other locations.
Now, in 1985, the PC market was strictly a Business market, but some "bright" marketer at CBM decided to try and sell the PC to the home market. They simply took a PC10 and re-labelled it the "Colt". Needless to say the Colt failed, but the PC market did remain lucritive to Commodore well up until 1994. The Commodore PC's were work horses, not great in any way, they just were reliable.
So, Very surprisingly (shipping only took 3 days) I got my CPC-10 in today. Actually it's a PC10-II
The first thing I did (even before turning it on) is take the cover off to see the inside. There was only a trace amount of dust on the back of the cards.

This is a very BASIC PC. In Typical Commodore fashion, there is no hard drive, or even a hard drive controller on the motherboard. The motherboard is a revison "A", dated 1985. There is no 287 Co-processor in this unit, but a socket for one.
All the pictures on Google show a battery on the motherboard, but this revision has none. When I can borrow a better camera, I will be documenting this machine more on the web site.
It has 2 cards, 1 in the AT slots for Video. This card has no markings, so I can't tell you if it is the Commodore Original or an aftermarket. It also has a Ram expansion card. This is simply labelled "Commodore Ram Extension 1986". The motherboard itself is relitively small compared to most other Commodore Boards (about the size of a normal MoBO today).

I put it all back together and booted it up. The System disks are labelled DOS 2.11, and indeed the boot screen showed Dos 2.11. I am not sure why Dos 3.2 was not here, but the start disks state Commodore PC-10 boot disks (hand written copies- of course).
The monitor looks to be a 10 inch Commodore mono monitor, but even though it does say Commodore on the front, the back has no Commodore labels or model number.It's not that they have fallen off, it's just the original manufacturer's stickers are there instead. K.A.P Consumer Electronics for those that are interested.
The PC boots just fine. It was stated before that Commodore continued the PET boot up sound to the PC. This is very true. The POST screen shows Commodore PC bios 2.01. The unit just has 640k, I guess they originally came with 320K.
The back of the unit is sparse. Just an RS232 "c" port and a "Centronics" or printer port.-It's actually labelled "Centronics".
The only other thing worth mentioning is the keyboard. The function keys are running up and down the side, instead of across the top. This is kind of cool, and sets them apart from other PC clones.

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