PC Ephemera

[Richard A. Cini]

I actually have one of these. My wife's uncle worked at IBM and bought the
PC and the expansion unit "way back when". It was a PC case with a backplane
and the interface card, connected by a 3' shielded cable which IMHO was way
too stiff for normal use. This unit has a 20mb hard drive in it and the last
time I used it (3-4 years ago) it worked fine.

If $2850 was the original price, that's a rip off. It's an empty PC case, a
backplane, power supply and an ISA card. $400 in parts at the most.

-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org]
On Behalf Of Chuck Guzis
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2005 9:42 PM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: PC Ephemera


On 10/26/2005 at 9:06 PM Joe R. wrote:

>   Well besides being HUGE and the fact that it didn't support all of 
>the cards, it costs $2585! (with a hard drive)  That's almost three times
what
>I paid for my first XT clone!   FWIW I've only seen one of the things.
They
>must not have sold many of them.

I used one for a time.  62 conductor thick round cable connected the two. I
recently scrapped the PC-side board of one--lots of LS374's IIRC.  I recall
that IBM swore that the added delay was negligible, but I kept running into
the of "You're not running our card in the expansion unit, are you? "
problem.  The cable wasn't long enough that you could do much else than
stack the two units on a normal sized desktop.  And then, the resulting pile
was too high to set a monitor on.  Two PSU fans didn't make for a quiet
workplace either.

I remember buying a Taiwanese mobo, case and a Sony monitor to replace the
PC 2-box setup at one of the De Anza college swap meets.  The monitor cost
more than the PC.  I think I tried using the expansion unit with the 8 Mhz
clone and had no luck at all.

Cheers,
Chuck