EC 1834
The personal computer EC 1834 was developed from 1986 in the GDR by VEB Robotron -Elektronik Dresden, Department of Devices E2 Karl-Marx-Stadt as the main developer, together with the VEB Booking Machine Plant Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz ) and the VEB Robotron Office Machine Plant "Ernst Thälmann “ Sömmerda and manufactured in both plants. Around 34,000 EC 1834 and around 120 functional models of the EC 1834.01 / EC 1834.M model were built.
hardware
The EC 1834 was an IBM PC XT -compatible PC and was equipped with an Intel 8086 -compatible CPU K1810WM86 clocked at 4.9152 MHz . A socket for a math coprocessor ( K1810WM87 or Intel 8087 could be used) was available. It had two 5.25-inch floppy disk drives (double-sided, 720 kByte capacity each), a hard disk (mostly 20 MByte, but also 40 MByte, of which only 32 MByte were initially usable), and had a main memory of 256 kByte. The main memory could be expanded with an additional memory expansion (capacity: 384 kByte) to 640 kByte - at that time the limit of conventional memory .
The first series was z. Partly without a hard drive, but with up to four floppy drives. Some of the devices with hard drives only had a floppy disk drive. There are also said to have been devices with two hard drives. In addition to the K 5504.20 / K 5504.50 from Robotron , Bulgarian hard disks and “Western imports” (including MFM hard disks from Seagate ) were used.
In the original version, the EC 1834 had eight slots with a three-row EFS connector. These were electrically compatible with the XT bus , but mechanically different. A more modern variant (EC 1834.01, also called EC 1834.M) also had some 8-bit ISA -Steckplätze, in the then Western ISA cards (eg. VGA - graphics cards or similar) fit.
The graphics controller was a U82720 . Optionally, the EC 1834 could be upgraded with a color graphics adapter, which was also an in-house development by Robotron. This was (through an emulation layer) compatible with the graphics standard CGA (hardware-related games ran without problems on this emulation, in contrast to the IBM VGA card) and supported the following resolution modes:
- 320 × 200 with 4 colors (CGA compatible)
- 640 × 200 monochrome
- 640 × 400 monochrome
- 640 × 480 with 16 colors from a palette of 4,096 colors (3x 4 bit)
Operating systems / software
As operating systems for the EC in 1834 either came DCP in versions 3.20 or 3.30 or UNIX - clone MUTOS1834 used. Alternatively, the EC 1834 can also be operated with CP / M-86 or DOS .
Predecessor and successor
By the beginning of the 1990s, the EC 1834 was to replace the A 7100 (incompatible with IBM-XT) and A 7150 (compatible with IBM XT due to slow graphic emulation layer), which were far more expensive and material-intensive in production .
In 1988 the development of an IBM AT -compatible successor, the EC 1835, began, but this computer (which was to be equipped with a U80601 processor, among other things ) no longer went into series production. Only about 20 functional models of this successor were built.
literature
- Collective of authors: The personal computer EC 1834 . Verlag Die Wirtschaft, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-349-00574-8 . (PDF)