Amstrad PC1512
The Amstrad PC1512 is a home computer introduced in 1986 . This made it one of the first privately used IBM PC- compatible computers in Europe . The manufacturer was the Amstrad company ; in German-speaking countries, the PC - like the previous Amstrad computers - was sold by the Schneider Computer Division under its own name.
The PC1512 used an Intel 8086 with 8 MHz and was delivered with 512 KByte RAM, but could be upgraded to 640 KByte RAM on the motherboard.
A PC1512 SD had one, a PC1512 DD two 5.25 inch floppy disk drives . A 20 MB hard disk was also offered. There was a choice between a black and white and a color monitor. The colors were displayed as grayscale on the black and white monitor. The 1512 had a CGA adapter with an additional 640x200x16 mode. Only its successor PC1640 was able to display CGA, HGC and EGA graphics.
In addition to the CGA connection, the motherboard had a parallel and a serial interface, a real-time clock (with assigned interrupt channel 2) and a 16 KB BIOS (with base segment 0xFC00) that handles the configuration (drives, interfaces, coprocessor, game port and Memory), but set bit 11 instead of bit 12 for a game port adapter in the equipment interrupt. In the first bios version there was no 24-hour overflow in the system time at midnight.
A special feature of the 1512 were the operating systems that came with it : In addition to Microsoft's MS-DOS , the PC also included the CP / M- based DOS Plus from Digital Research and the GEM ( Graphical Environment Manager ) graphical user interface known from the Atari ST home computer . This is why this computer already had a 2-button mouse with a connection on the left side of the PC as standard .
With the 1512 the power supply was in the monitor, so a fan was not necessary. Noise was only caused by the drives. On the other hand, this meant that the monitor could not be replaced by a commercially available one.
Four commercially available AA batteries were used as buffer batteries for the BIOS settings and not lithium batteries as is common today . The batteries were located under the monitor mount in the PC housing and could be changed easily and without tools. The time and BIOS settings were lost when the computer was switched off when the battery was changed.
Another special feature was a lid over the slots for three extensions that could be opened without tools. An additional card (additional graphics card, COM connection card, etc.) could therefore be installed without opening the entire PC. However, the stop for the mounting plate of the additional cards was too deep.
A Schneider 1512 with a floppy disk drive and black and white monitor cost just under DM 2000 in 1986 , a surcharge for a second floppy disk drive DM 500, a surcharge for a color monitor instead of black and white DM 500.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Happy Computer: 10/1986 Schneider PC: the new dimension. Accessed April 2, 2018 (German).