Dec 11, 2022
Amstrad PPC640. I used to own one of these, it's a great little portable turbo XT.
Large Scale Systems Museum (LSSM) - mact.io - Pittsburgh, PA
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Amstrad PPC640. I used to own one of these, it's a great little portable turbo XT.
Large Scale Systems Museum (LSSM) - mact.io - Pittsburgh, PA
Further PPC640 stuff. Yes that's a parallel port zip drive providing storage through palmzip.
Experiments with photographing Amstrad PPC640 screen
Got this beauty up and running again today (don’t worry about that drive error, it was just the first boot disk I tested). Check out its sweet specs:
PROCESSOR========================================
Processor Type: 8 MHz V30
1.2 PCDR Instruction Mix MIPS 870.7 Dhrystones/Second
MEMORY ACCESS=======================================
RAM ROM Video EMS UMB Read 8-Bit 770 770 399 -- -- kB/s Read 16-Bit 1484 1484 399 -- -- kB/s Write 8-Bit 1596 -- 399 -- -- kB/s Write 16-Bit 2968 -- 399 -- -- kB/s Move 8-Bit 833 -- 203 -- -- kB/s Move 16-Bit 1596 -- 203 -- -- kB/s
VIDEO OUTPUT=================================
Video Adapter Type: CGA
Direct 19212 Characters/second BIOS 118592 Characters/second DOS 2304 Characters/second
SYSTEM CONFIGURATION====================================
Operating System - DOS 3.30
Base Memory - 640 kB Expanded Memory - N/A Extended Memory - N/A
Fixed Disk Drives - None Installed Floppy Disk Drives - 2
PC-DOCTOR 1.5 Copyright 1995 Watergate Software Inc. 19:51 8/4/2016
Some years ago, I bought an Amstrad PPC640 off of a guy who thought it was "the first portable ever made". Got a good deal too, and the only flaw is that the screen hinge on one side doesn't latch well.
It came with what I think is MS-DOS 3.3 (it's been awhile since I played with it) and not really any software. I'm not entirely sure what kind of stuff I would even be able to run on a hard-to-read monochrome LCD screen. Maybe Digger? But look, it has a full travel keyboard: insane for a portable machine.
The whole thing folds up into a tiny little thing with a handle, which then fits into the most uncomfortable bag I've ever put a computer into. It's got a modem, plus parallel and serial ports, so maybe it would work with terminal software. It has 640KB of memory, an NEC V30 which roughly equates to an 8088, 8Mhz clock speed, dual 720KB 3.5" floppy drives, and the ability to put 10 C batteries in it to make it *gasp* portable. Apparently you can even plug in an external CGA monitor for 4 or 16 color graphics.
One day when it isn't in deep storage I will bust it out again and maybe try to run something interesting on it. Either that or I'll sell it to somebody who will love it, but that's not a concern right now.
That's not a typo, it does take 10 C cell batteries