Alphatronic PC16

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The Alphatronic PC16 from Triumph-Adler was an extremely compact office computer . The case resembled typical home computers such as B. from Commodore or Schneider / Amstrad CPC . Nevertheless, it was intended for serious applications and extremely unsuitable for gaming due to its lack of graphics and sound capabilities. It was intended as a self-developed successor to the Alphatronic PC , which was a purchased part. As a novelty, a 16-bit processor from Intel was used with the 8088 . This enabled the use of MS-DOS 2.11 from Microsoft as the operating system, which was specially adapted to the computer due to the special hardware. This MS-DOS version was not IBM compatible and one reason that this device was not accepted by the market. CP / M (80) support was only possible by replacing the original Intel 8088 CPU with the NEC V20 CPU . L2 (operating system) (Eumel) was available as an additional operating system . For hobbyists there was the possibility to operate a single-board computer based on Z8 with its own BASIC via the V24 interface .

The compact design limited the expansion options enormously. There was no ISA bus , so the many ISA cards from other providers could not be used. The graphics card was housed in a special module that was inserted from the side. However, there was only the standard module and a BTX module with which the computer could also be used as a BTX decoder. Next still had PAL - TV modulator available. The keyboard had a non-standard layout that lacked some keys (such as "Backspace"). The somewhat sparse RAM quickly became a problem, as it could only be expanded to a limited extent. As with the predecessor, a floppy drive had to be connected externally. The first drive also contained the drive controller and power supply and was therefore relatively expensive; a cheaper second drive without its own controller could be connected to this. It was also possible to connect a hard disk with 10 MB or 20 MB to this bus . However, the high market price resulted in very little demand for this option.

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