| 2009-09-13 Olivetti PCS 286 |
  Yesterday I was visiting an old electronics flea market in Marzaglia looking for some retrocomputing goodies, when I spotted a Olivetti PCS 286 under a table. It is the same model I had at home in 1989, on which I learned programming! GWBASIC, QBasic, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++... the goold old DOS days.I couldn't resist and I bought it for a couple of coffee cups. The seller only told me it was missing the operating system. At home, I disamblessed and cleaned it thorougly, and it seemed OK. Disassembling a PC from the '80s is quite a different experience from a today PC: the body of the machine is made with heavy 1mm thick stainless steel, after 20 years there isn't a single spot of rust. Also of note is the disposition of components inside: to maintain a compact design, the drives and the PSU are all in the front side of the machine, leaving all the rear to expansion boards; the ISA slot covers are on the right side of the machine, not in the rear. I was also pleased to notice that this unit was super-charged with 4 MB of RAM (the maximum it can get onboard) and a 40 MB hard disk, the bigger offered at the time with this machine. After cleaning, I hooked it up to a keyboard and a monitor; it has PS/2 and VGA ports which are still the most common ports, so almost any keyboard and monitor will work. The CMOS battery was drained, so I had to enter the BIOS setup and configure the machine. But after rebooting, it did not recognize neither the hard disk or the floppy drive! That's why it complained about the operating system. Calm down. I first tried the units on another PC: the hard disk, a Conner CP3044, is a standard IDE unit and worked OK, but the floppy drive, a Sony MFD-17W-86, did not. However, the Olivetti didn't like any other floppy drive I gave him - looks like Olivetti did some modifications to the floppy interface. Unfortunaltely I don't have any manual, and I couldn't find anything useful online for this machine. This is a show stopper: without a floppy or an hard disk, I can't load any OS to do any other test. If someone can send me some info, like a scan of the technical manual, I will really appreciate. Update: it now boots from floppy! It looks like it wants the hard disk connected, even if it does not recognize it. Some chipset issue, I think. Olivetti has simplified the BIOS setup so you can choose only a couple options (20 or 40 MB), there are no signs of customizable settings for heads-cylinders-sectors so I cannot try with a different disk. I read some suggestions of trying the BIOS from another motherboard with the same chipset (a Headland HT101A), which is probably doable on such old boards. I'll take a look into this someday. |
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Mi hai fatto scendere la lacrimuccia!!!
E' il mio mitico PC che mi ha lanciato, a partire dal 1988, in questo fantastico mondo!
Anche io sono di Milano, dai un'occhiata al mio sito!
P.S. il mio PCS286 è tutt'ora funzionante! Ha 1 MB di RAM e 20 MB di HD. Ti confermo che le uniche scelte possibili di HD erano 20 MB o 40 MB (drivers rigorosamente della Conner, erano davvero indistruttibili!).
ByEz!