At 02:48 AM 3/14/98 +0000, you wrote:
- Amstrad PCW 8256 (z80/cpm system?)
Yes, CPM system. I've seen two of these for sale in in the past week.
Apparently they sold most of these as word processors and not as computers.
These require the special 3 inch disks, so you may want to be sure it
includes some since they're hard to find.
It is possible to fit 3.5" drives into these machines. AFAIK, all you
have to do is match up signals between the 34 pin connector on the 3.5"
(720K, of course) drive and the 26 pin connector in the machine. I can
look up pinouts of the latter in the service manual.
- Sanyo MBC 550 (straight PC clone?)
A pain in the A__! I used to have one. I requies special DOS and won't
run a lot of the MS-DOS software, Skip it!
All the more reason to save it!. It's a reasonably uncommon machine IMHO.
So what if it doesn't run most MS-DOS software - nor do most of my
machines. We have PC's for that :-)
I used to have tons of software specificly for the Sanyo. I'll have to
look and see if any of it's still around. If it is you're welcome to it.
I sunk a fortne in my Sanyo, I wouldn't have another one if you gave it to
me. I bless the day that the PC clones became available.
Seriously, there are 2 classes of machine in my
collection. The first are
machines like (although I hate to say it) the PC I'm typing this on,
PERQs, PDP11's, PDP8's, etc - machines that run useful programs, and are
useful computers. The second is machines which, although interesting
computers, and worth preserving are not so useful. In my case these
consist mainly of home micros. I keep them running, and I use them from
time to time. But if I want to write a letter, or do some programming, I
use one of the first category of machines. Of course how you group your
machines depends on what you want to do with them.
The Sanyo is in the sceond group IMHO. It's still worth preserving.
That's only becuase you never had to try to use one!
Joe
-tony