Posts tagged olivetti

Car boot Pickups – 2nd September 2012

3
8 months ago
by Andy in

Bit of a result form the carboot sale today.

  • Commodore Amiga 1200 (No PSU or and internal addons) – £3 (Yeah, £3. Knocked him down from £4 as I said it had no PSU!)
  • Olivetti EO Personal Communicator 440 * 2 – 50p each!

Some non retro stuff too.

  • EBD Reader –  Used to read diag data from your car.
  • USB Sound card – for use for my amateur radio exploits.

The Olivetti EO is the most interesting item of the lot.

This early tablet has the AT&T Hobbit RISC-based processor running at 20 MHz, 4 MByte of RAM and a 10Mb storage card. The touch screen is a high contrast, 110 dpi reflective LCD, 640 x 480 pixel resolution, screen size 5.9″ x 4.3″. It comes bundled with the following software.

  • Pensoft Personal Perspective
  • GO Mail
  • GO FAX
  • GO’s PenTOPS and PenCentral
  • EO Phone
  • GO MiniNote
  • EO Calc
  • EO Lock
  • EO Sound

Sadly, it did not come with a PSU so I have not powered them up yet. The 2 CR123A batteries. I will put up another post about the EO once I have ut working.

You can read the personal account of David Hembrow, who worked for EO between 1991 and 1993 here.

For more info about the EO, check out this Wikipedia page.

Computing History acquires a rare Acorn A680

2
1 year ago
by Andy in

The Centre for Computing History has acquired a rare Acorn A680 desktop computer.

The A680 Technical Publishing System was developed by Acorn for Olivetti in 1988. Although it runs RISC iX, it seems to have been the original development machine as it’s architecture differs from the Archimedes (e.g. there is no RISC OS component and the maximum RAM is 8MB).

This machine was built by Acorn in 1988 as one of the prototypes for a desktop publishing system to be sold by Olivetti. The system was never put into production so the remaining prototypes are very hard to find.

The A680 runs a variant of BSD 4.3 Unix called RISC iX : although the A680 was the first machine built to run RISC iX, it was used to develop versions later released on machines similar to the Archimedes series – the R140, R260 and R225. However, the A680 had substantially different (and more expensive) hardware than those machines with many built-in features that were options on the later models. It was therefore in use at Acorn long after the R140 was complete and didn’t become obsolete until spare R260s were available.

The information above and further details can be found at http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/16155/Acorn-A680/ and http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/RISCiXComputers.html#A680

Computing History Addition – Olivetti M380/C

0
2 years ago
by Andy in

Olivetti 380/C Personal Computer  used in the Pandora Project
Machine type: XP 1050 Serial No: 3929437 1988

ME916 4MB RAM Card
GO723 – HD/FD Controller ST506RLL
GO481 – Paradise VGA PVGA1A
Western Digital WD8003EBT Ethernet Card.
Siemens ESCC2-Userboard 2 Channel Enhanced Serial Communication Controller with a Siemens 80186 CPU

The Pandora project was an experimental system for multimedia applications instigated by Andy Hopper in conjunction with Olivetti Research Laboratory Trumpington St., Cambridge, UK, CB2 1QA and the University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory, Downing Place, Cambridge, UK, CB2 3QG
(more…)

My Olivetti M380/C – More info!

0
4 years ago
by Andy in

Here is a list of the expansion cards in this machine.

  • ME916 4MB RAM Card
  • GO723 – HD/FD Controller ST506RLL
  • GO481 – Paradise VGA PVGA1A
  • Western Digital WD8003EBT Ethernet Card.
  • Siemens ESCC2-Userboard 2 Channel Enhanced Serial Communication Controller – Has a Siemens 80186 CPU on it. PDF

There is one other card in this machine – I guess it is some kind of development board.

P/N 9108002 REV A TMI-110-03  – Some kind of PCMCIA board. Has a MB86301 controller.

The hard disk is about to fail. Its quite noisey, and there are a few bad block on the disk.  I dont think I will be keeping this machine…

Please post any comments about this machine if you have arrived from Google etc, as I would like to know what problems you are having with your machine.

New additions – old PC's

0
4 years ago
by Andy in

In a pile of old PCs I was given yesterday, there we two old machines. A IBM PC AT and a Olivetti M380/C

Ive not tested these machines yet…

Photo of the IBM

Photo of the Olivetti

There were also some 486, Pentium and Pentium 3 pcs in the pile. The Pentiums will probably go on Freecycle.

Also got a stack of SIMMs, ZIP drives and hard disks.

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