On 6/26/07, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
In the "odd PCs" department, I have to mention the Seequa
Chameleon. It has an 8088 and a Z80, so it can run
DOS, CP/M-80, or
CP/M-86.
The DEC Rainbow 100 was a similar machine, it had a 8086 and a Z/80, and
could triple (or quad) boot into CPM/80, CPM/86, MS-DOS, or act as a VT-220
via hardware emulation. It didn't get far as it used wacky 400Kb single
sided quad density floppies that hardly anyone else used. According to
Wikipedia, DEC even ported Windows 1.0 to it.
A couple more oddities-
The Tandy 2000 was one of the few 80186 based clones, and ran well behaved
MS-DOS apps, though it had somewhat oddball video hardware, keyboard and
serial port setup. It required a custom version of DOS, and MS even ported
Xenix to it.
The Atari Portfolio was probably the first palmtop device that ran DOS apps,
though it was such a wacky architecture it's software support was limited.
The HP 100 series were some of the first laptop computers that could run
DOS. It had DOS, Basic, Lotus and a few other productivity apps in ROM, and
used the somewhat odd HP-IL bus to interface with peripherals, among them a
battery powered disk drive.