While looking for another part (actually a replacement door for a Tandon
5.25" drive) in the depths of my workshop, I came across a machine I'd
half-forgotten owening, and wondered if anyone recognises it.
It's made by Panasonic, and is a luggable. The carrying handle is one one
side (not the back, as is usual for such machines). The front of the
machine comes off, and is an XT-layout keyboard (alas F9 and F10 are
missing on my unit, but I'll bet that's what the missing keys should be).
The front of the main unit has a 9" monochrome CRT, and to the right of
it 2 vertical half-height 5.25" drive bays. On my machine the left one
contains a floppy drive, the right one a Seagate hard drive. To the left
of the CRT is a pull-out stretchy cable ending in a mini-DIN plug that
fits the hack of the keyboard
On the back are the normal mains connnector, switch and fuse. A DE9
connector marked RGB (CGA pinout?) a 36 pin microribbon printer port and
a DB25 serial port. On top of the unit is a thermal printer.
It comes apart by removing numerous screws. In the bottom of the machine,
accessible from under the chassis is a large PCB. It contains an 8088
with a 40 pin DIL socket alongside it (8087?), 256K DRAM, 8250 serial
chip, 8255 parallel chip, 6845 CRT controller, a PQFP surface=mount
device alongside it (video circuitry), 8257 DMA chip, etc. Basically,
what you'd expect to find on a PC/XT motherboard. Theere are 2 62 pin
expansion slots, one of which contains the hard disk controller (looks to
be a generic PC/XT part), the other contains a PCB with 512K RAM (I would
guess only 640K of the totla memory is useable) and a real time clock chip.
The printer has its own cotnrol electronics based round a 8050
microcontroller. The keyboard contians an 8048.
Does anyone recognise this machine?
-tony