22 May
2009
22 May
'09
2:06 p.m.
Lovely late-1980s vintage CP/M machine. A neighbour of mine has just
found a forgotten PCW 8256 and she wants rid of it.
It's in south London.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
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22 May
22 May
2:32 p.m.
On 22 May 2009 at 19:06, Liam Proven wrote:
Lovely late-1980s vintage CP/M machine. A neighbour of
mine has just
found a forgotten PCW 8256 and she wants rid of it.
It's in south London.
If no nibbles, try posting on the Vintage Computer forum. I've got
one of these, fitted with 3.5" drives--for a CP/M box, it's not bad,
particularly if populated with lots of memory. Even better if it
comes with a serial I/O adapter and the printer's included.
--Chuck
23 May
23 May
4:49 a.m.
On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 11:32 -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 22 May 2009 at 19:06, Liam Proven wrote:
I often considered gutting mine and recasing it - as a certain
North-East collector might put it "rare as paving slabs" - with a
smaller (maybe 9") monitor, upping the RAM to the full-fat 512k and
maybe a 3.5" disk. Hmmm - I've got a knackered Mac Classic kicking
around and a few 9" CCTV monitors...
The thing that puts me off removing it from my Mum's attic is it takes
up a lot of space for something I wouldn't use that much.
Gordon
Lovely late-1980s vintage CP/M machine. A
neighbour of mine has just
found a forgotten PCW 8256 and she wants rid of it.
It's in south London.
If no nibbles, try posting on the Vintage Computer forum. I've got
one of these, fitted with 3.5" drives--for a CP/M box, it's not bad,
particularly if populated with lots of memory. Even better if it
comes with a serial I/O adapter and the printer's included. 
10:14 a.m.
I often considered gutting mine and recasing it - as a certain
North-East collector might put it "rare as paving slabs" - with a
smaller (maybe 9") monitor, upping the RAM to the full-fat 512k and
maybe a 3.5" disk. Hmmm - I've got a knackered Mac Classic kicking
around and a few 9" CCTV monitors...
The thing that puts me off removing it from my Mum's attic is it takes
up a lot of space for something I wouldn't use that much.
Gordon
Then there are the five "new in box" 9512plus models i have in storage,
complete with daisy wheel printers software and keyboards!!
Roger
25 May
25 May
12:49 p.m.
2009/5/22 Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com>:
On 22 May 2009 at 19:06, Liam Proven wrote:
Will do, but I've never had so much as a nibble from there thus far
when trying to give away kit.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
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MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508
Lovely late-1980s vintage CP/M machine. A
neighbour of mine has just
found a forgotten PCW 8256 and she wants rid of it.
It's in south London.
If no nibbles, try posting on the Vintage Computer forum. ?I've got
one of these, fitted with 3.5" drives--for a CP/M box, it's not bad,
particularly if populated with lots of memory. ?Even better if it
comes with a ?serial I/O adapter and the printer's included.
--Chuck 
5:37 p.m.
Hi,
Just so you know - the only reason why I am not nibbling is that I am
located in Australia, and it would be expensive to ship it over here.
Sorry.
Doug :-(
:-)
Liam Proven wrote:
2009/5/22 Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com>:
On 22 May 2009 at 19:06, Liam Proven wrote:
Will do, but I've never had so much as a nibble from there thus far
when trying to give away kit.
Lovely late-1980s vintage CP/M machine. A
neighbour of mine has just
found a forgotten PCW 8256 and she wants rid of it.
It's in south London.
If no nibbles, try posting on the Vintage Computer forum. I've got
one of these, fitted with 3.5" drives--for a CP/M box, it's not bad,
particularly if populated with lots of memory. Even better if it
comes with a serial I/O adapter and the printer's included.
--Chuck
5:49 p.m.
Doug Jackson wrote:
Hi,
Just so you know - the only reason why I am not nibbling is that I am
located in Australia, and it would be expensive to ship it over here.
Sorry.
So what did you have down under for PC's. Here Amstrad == old 286's with CGA and
HD and a time of
day clock that don't work!
Doug :-(
:-)
7:38 p.m.
bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca wrote:
So what did you have down under for PC's. Here Amstrad == old 286's
with CGA and HD and a time of
day clock that don't work!
No,
In Australia, Amstrad sold a bunch of machines, ranging from a set of
Z80 systems, some with onboard cassette, through to 3 inch mini floppy,
to a single case system with floppys onboard.
Yes, they did make a PC compatible system, but if you see any of my
other posts, that is in the 'booring' category.
Doug
26 May
26 May
3:16 p.m.
So what did you have down under for PC's. Here
Amstrad == old 286's with CGA and
HD and a time of
day clock that don't work!
Here (UK, where Amstrad are based) there were many ranges of Amstrad
computers. The ones I remember started with the CPC464, a home computer
with a built-in cassette recorder (so no volume level troubles :-)) and
which came with either a greenscreen or colour monitor [1]. Amstrad later
sold an RF modulator you could use to connect the machine to a normal TV
set and even a TV tuner unit to turn the monitor into a TV.
This machine begat the CPC664 and CPC6128 which had built-in 3" disk
drives but which otherwise were quite similar
[1] IIRC the colour montor had RGB inputs each one of which could be
pulled hihg. pulled low, or left floating giving a rather unuusal 27
hardware colours.
The PCW series were sold as word processors, they came with a printer
(dot matrix or daisywheel depeneding on the model) and word processing
software. Byt they were also reasonable CP/M machines.
The PC compatibles started with the PC1512 and PC1640 which were PC/XT
clones (or at least close to that). One odd feature of these machiens is
that the PSU is in the monitor (it's acutally one SMPSU for both the
monitor and computer), so you can't easily use any other monitor with
said machines. The power connector IIRC was a 14 pin DIN plug.
The PPC series were large laptops (large enough to have a full keyboard
including the number pad) but with a small LCD display and 1 or 2 3.5"
drives. I think I mentioned that machine the other day here.
Later PCs were much closer to being normal clones...
One advantage of older Amstrad machines is that there were real service
manuals avaiable (Amstrad service manual = schematics + parts list + not
much else), and they were not expensive. Disadvantages include the fact
that they were cheaply made [2] and use a lot of ASICs [3].
[2] One example of this is that one series of PC clones had a
battery-backed real time clock. The battery was 4 AA cells in series (not
a bad idea), whcih fitted into a holder on top of the machine. But there
was no cover on this holder, the battery was covered when you put the
monitor on top of the machine.
[3] The logic board in a PCW machine contains a large ASIC, Z80, RAM,
disk controller, etc, but _no ROM_. There's enough logic in the ASIC to
provide a simple bootstrap program to load the first sector from the
floppy drive.
-tony
4:45 p.m.
2009/5/26 Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk>:
All sounds bang-on to me. Good little summary.
The Amstrad 2000-series machines (8086, 386, 386) were quite good PCs
for the time, and for the late 1980s, quite futuristic. Side-mounted
keyboard port, like their ancestors the 1512 & 1640, all I/O
integrated on the motherboard, and a non-removable case cover with
just a hatch to cover the expansion slots. They had no 5.25" drive
bays, which seemed prescient, if bold, then - but this was before
CD-ROMs had been invented. The 386 model was a relatively quick
308DX/20MHz, IIRC, with even some secondary cache, and came with 4MB
RAM, a very large amount for the time. I recall thinking it was an
ideal Power User's machine for Windows 3.0 but it was just a little
too early for that.
The 2000s were too radical, though, and bombed on the market.
Stripped-back units were sold off as near barebones boxes under the
name of the 1000 series: 1086, 1286 & 1386. As such they were very
cheap but the spec was now poor.
Then came the 3000s, which were vanilla beige boxes, just like anyone
else's, complete with 5.25" bays. My employers sold quite a few of
them, though, sometimes with big Apricot MCA servers.
The 1512 and 1640 were quite weird for XT clones, though. All I/O
onboard & proprietary graphics chips. The 1512 was CGA but did 640x200
in 16 colours via a proprietary mode that the bundled GEM desktop
could use but not much else. They came with DR's DOS+ as an option,
too.
The 1640 was only very slightly more vanilla - its EGA-compatible chip
boasted a proprietary high-res mode too.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508
So what did
you have down under for PC's. Here Amstrad == old 286's with CGA and
HD and a time of
day clock that don't work!
Here (UK, where Amstrad are based) there were many ranges of Amstrad
computers. The ones I remember started with the CPC464, a home computer
with a built-in cassette recorder (so no volume level troubles :-)) and
which came with either a greenscreen or colour monitor [1]. Amstrad later
sold an RF modulator you could use to connect the machine to a normal TV
set and even a TV tuner unit to turn the monitor into a TV.
This machine begat the CPC664 and CPC6128 which had built-in 3" disk
drives but which otherwise were quite similar
[1] IIRC the colour montor had RGB inputs each one of which could be
pulled hihg. pulled low, or left floating giving a rather unuusal 27
hardware colours.
The PCW series were sold as word processors, they came with a printer
(dot matrix or daisywheel depeneding on the model) and word processing
software. Byt they were also reasonable CP/M machines.
The PC compatibles started with the PC1512 and PC1640 which were PC/XT
clones (or at least close to that). One odd feature of these machiens is
that the PSU is in the monitor (it's acutally one SMPSU for both the
monitor and computer), so you can't easily use any other monitor with
said machines. The power connector IIRC was a 14 pin DIN plug.
The PPC series were large laptops (large enough to have a full keyboard
including the number pad) but with a small LCD display and 1 or 2 3.5"
drives. I think I mentioned that machine the other day here.
Later PCs were much closer to being normal clones...
One advantage of older Amstrad machines is that there were real service
manuals avaiable (Amstrad service manual = schematics + parts list + not
much else), and they were not expensive. Disadvantages include the fact
that they were cheaply made [2] and use a lot of ASICs [3].
[2] One example of this is that one series of PC clones had a
battery-backed real time clock. The battery was 4 AA cells in series (not
a bad idea), whcih fitted into a holder on top of the machine. But there
was no cover on this holder, the battery was covered when you put the
monitor on top of the machine.
[3] The logic board in a PCW machine contains a large ASIC, Z80, RAM,
disk controller, etc, but _no ROM_. There's enough logic in the ASIC to
provide a simple bootstrap program to load the first sector from the
floppy drive. 
27 May
27 May
5:18 a.m.
On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 09:45:14PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
The 2000s were too radical, though, and bombed on the market.
Not helped by the extremely dodgy hd controller in the 2386 models (I
vaguely recall one of these appearing at the hospital I worked at at
the time, soon to be pushed into a corner as its unreliability became
apparent).
There's info here : http://www.ipit-update.com/ictcon10.htm
--
3:03 p.m.
The Amstrad 2000-series machines (8086, 386, 386) were
quite good PCs
for the time, and for the late 1980s, quite futuristic. Side-mounted
keyboard port, like their ancestors the 1512 & 1640, all I/O
And that keyboard port, at least on some machines, was non-standard.
These machines had a bulit-in mouse port (DE9 connector) for a quatrature
mouse. The keyboard port was a 6 pin DIN socket. The reason was that
while the mouse 'position' signals went to one of the gate arrays on the
motherboard, the mouse buttons were linked to 2 of the pins on the
keyboard socket (the other 4 being the normal +5V, ground, clock, data).
The mouse buttons were heandled by the keyboard microcontroller and
appeared to the machine as keypresses.
-tony
26 May
26 May
5:03 p.m.
On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 20:16 +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
[2] One example of this is that one series of PC
clones had a
battery-backed real time clock. The battery was 4 AA cells in series (not
a bad idea), whcih fitted into a holder on top of the machine. But there
was no cover on this holder, the battery was covered when you put the
monitor on top of the machine.
They didn't keep time properly if you used alkalines here - also, they
would usually moan about the batteries being flat. This is because the
batteries were in fact providing too *high* a voltage! Putting
mostly-flat alkalines in worked okay.
Gordon
27 May
27 May
3:10 p.m.
[Amstrad PC real-time clock battery]
They didn't keep time properly if you used alkalines here - also, they
would usually moan about the batteries being flat. This is because the
batteries were in fact providing too *high* a voltage! Putting
mostly-flat alkalines in worked okay.
Right... Isn't the other trick to wire a diode or two in series with the
battery pack? I wonder if 3 cells + a 'dummy' (as you use to fill up
spaces in some battery chargers) would work
-tony
26 May
26 May
6:26 p.m.
ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) writes:
Later PCs were much closer to being normal clones...
... with the possible exception of the splendidly bizarre Amstrad Mega
PC, which was a 386 PC that included a Sega MegaDrive games console on
an ISA card.
It's also worth noting that Amstrad ended up buying and continuing
Sinclair's family of computers, hence the CPC646-esque Spectrum +2 and
the 6128-esque +3. The Amstrad machines I've encountered seem to be an
odd mix of solid, well-thought-out design and incredibly cheap and nasty
manufacturing, but I've always had a soft spot for the PCWs...
--
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org> <http://offog.org/>
3:17 p.m.
ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) writes:
I;'d forgotten that one, and don't have any docs on it...
Checking my docs has found a service manuals for a series of machines I'd
forogten/ There were 464 Plus and 6128 Plus machines, which were related
to the 'non Plus' versions, but had better graphics (4096 hardware
colours) and totally different styling (look a bit like C128s). They work
with the MM12 and CM14 monitors (mono and colour respectively).
Related to that (in that it's in the same service manual) is the GX4000
which seems to be a cartridge-based games console.
-tony
Later PCs were much closer to being normal
clones...
... with the possible exception of the splendidly bizarre Amstrad Mega
PC, which was a 386 PC that included a Sega MegaDrive games console on
an ISA card.
3:57 p.m.
On 27 May 2009, at 20:17, Tony Duell wrote:
Checking my docs has found a service manuals for a series of machines
I'd
forogten/ There were 464 Plus and 6128 Plus machines, which were
related
to the 'non Plus' versions, but had better graphics (4096 hardware
colours) and totally different styling (look a bit like C128s). They
work
with the MM12 and CM14 monitors (mono and colour respectively).
Related to that (in that it's in the same service manual) is the GX4000
which seems to be a cartridge-based games console.
-tony
Not forgetting the Amstrad PENPAD.. an Apple Newton knockoff at a
tenth the price.
Roger
6:19 p.m.
Roger Pugh wrote:
Not forgetting the Amstrad PENPAD.. an Apple Newton
knockoff at a tenth
the price.
I have one of those! The rubbery plastic coating on the case
has deteriorated over the years, and is now a very sticky mess.
I took the machine along to Dorkbot Bristol and had to handle
it with rubber gloves to avoid getting the stickiness all over
my hands. The audience found this very amusing.
--
John Honniball
coredump at gifford.co.uk
6:10 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
Related to that (in that it's in the same service
manual) is the GX4000
which seems to be a cartridge-based games console.
I saw one of those last week in a charity shop. It's a beige
plasitc box with two game controllers attached. Presumably
electronically similar to the CPC464 and CPC664.
--
John Honniball
coredump at gifford.co.uk
7:02 p.m.
On 27/05/2009 23:10, "John Honniball" <coredump at gifford.co.uk> wrote:
Tony Duell wrote:
Related to that (in that it's in the same
service manual) is the GX4000
which seems to be a cartridge-based games console.
I saw one of those last week in a charity shop. It's a beige
plasitc box with two game controllers attached. Presumably
electronically similar to the CPC464 and CPC664. From memory the GX4000 is a repackaged CPC6128, similar
hardware. I only
have 4 games for mine so I'm guessing they weren't that
popular.
--
Adrian/Witchy
Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator
Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer
collection?
28 May
28 May
2:24 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
You're lucky. Charity shops round here never sell mains-powered stuff,
and often don't even sell battery-powered calculators, etc.
Related to that (in that it's in the same
service manual) is the GX4000
which seems to be a cartridge-based games console.
I saw one of those last week in a charity shop. It's a beige plasitc box with two game controllers attached.
Presumably
electronically similar to the CPC464 and CPC664.
It's closer (as in almost indentical) to the CPC464 Plus. It has the
later ULA chip (with the 4096 hardware colours), and from what I can see no
internal ROM. The CPC464 Pluse (and CPC6128 Plus) don't appear to have
internal ROM eiother (unless there's a small bootstrap in the ULA chip,
as in the PCW series).
According to the service manual. the CPC464 Plus came with a 128K ROM
cartridge containing BASIC and a 'Burning Rubber Game'. The GX4000 came
with a 128K ROM cartridge contianing the 'Burning Rubber Game'. My guess
is that it's the same cartridge, but the keyboard lines on the ULA are
hard-wired to sleect the game at power-on (there is some evidence of this
on the schematic). I wonder if you could hack the machine a bit, add a
matrix of switches as a keyboard and run it as a CPC464 Plus?
One featuer it has that the CPCs don't is a PAL video encoder and a SCART
socket.
-tony
26 May
26 May
8:14 p.m.
[1] IIRC the colour montor had RGB inputs each one of
which could be
pulled hihg. pulled low, or left floating giving a rather unuusal 27
hardware colours.
On the subject of the Color Monitor that was used with the CPC464, I am
looking for a replacement EHT transformer.
The monitor is the color one with the 5v cable to supply power to the
CPC464.
The unit had a failed LOP Transistor (Which I have replaced), but the
160V rail is still being dragged down, and I have no EHT on the anode
cap - I have removed all the secondary loads from the EHT, so I am
confident that the fault is within the transformer itself. At this
stage, I am suspicious of one of the HV diodes within the transformer,
but everything is epoxied.
Doug
27 May
27 May
3:35 p.m.
[1] IIRC the colour montor had RGB inputs each
one of which could be
pulled hihg. pulled low, or left floating giving a rather unuusal 27
hardware colours.
On the subject of the Color Monitor that was used with the CPC464, I am
looking for a replacement EHT transformer.
The monitor is the color one with the 5v cable to supply power to the
CPC464.
The unit had a failed LOP Transistor (Which I have replaced), but the
160V rail is still being dragged down, and I have no EHT on the anode
cap - I have removed all the secondary loads from the EHT, so I am
Have you checked the horizontal yoke, yoke coupling capacitor (C429),
tuning capacitors (C431, C432), etc.
-tony
25 May
25 May
6:02 p.m.
Liam Proven wrote:
Will do, but I've never had so much as a nibble from there thus
far
when trying to give away kit.
I'll add a comment to your listing, explaining exactly what it is
that you're offering, if it will help. The Amstrad PCW did make a
brief US appearance, being sold by Sears Roebuck in their retail
computer stores (mine is such a machine, operating from 120v 60Hz
power). I suspect it was the difficulty in finding 3" CF floppies
that caused them to disappear into the depths of attics and
basements. The WP software was actually pretty good--and they could
also run CP/M 3.0. A bit unique in being a low-end Z80 personal
computer that had no hardware text display capability--it's all
graphics.
--Chuck
5496
days inactive
5502
days old
24 comments
12 participants
participants (12)
-
alexandre-listas＠e-secure.com.br -
ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk -
ats＠offog.org -
bfranchuk＠jetnet.ab.ca -
cclist＠sydex.com -
classiccmp＠discordance.org.uk -
coredump＠gifford.co.uk -
doug＠stillhq.com -
gordonjcp＠gjcp.net -
lproven＠gmail.com -
rogpugh＠mac.com -
witchy＠binarydinosaurs.co.uk