Olivetti M24
CPU | Intel 8086; Intel 80286 (PC 6300 Plus, PC 6310, PC 6312) @ 8 MHz; 10 MHz (M24 SP); 6 MHz (PC 6300 Plus); 8 MHz (PC 6310); 12 MHz (PC 6312) |
---|---|
Memory | 128 KB or 256 KB (expandable to 640 KB) |
Storage | 20 MB hard disk (Xerox 6060) |
Removable storage | floppy disk |
Display | 320 x 200, 640 x 200, 640 x 400 with up to 16 colors; 512 x 256 with up to 8 colors |
Graphics | Video Enhanced Adapter EGC 2413, Motorola 6845 (Enhanced CGA-compatible video card) |
Sound | Beeper |
Successor | Olivetti M240, Olivetti M28 |
The Olivetti M24 is a computer that was sold by Olivetti in 1983 using the Intel 8086 CPU.[1]
The system was sold in the United States under its original name by
It was also available in France as the PERSONA 1600,[7] built by LogAbax.[8]
Versions
The initial 1984 US version named AT&T 6300 came with either one or two 360 KB 5.25" floppy drives; a hard disk was not offered.
In Europe, Olivetti launched a 10 MHz version: the Olivetti M24 SP, announced in November 1985,[9] a contender for the title of "highest clocked 8086 computer" as its processor was the fastest grade of 8086-2, rated for a maximum speed of exactly the same 10 MHz. To support this, the motherboard now featured a switchable 24/30 MHz master crystal, still divided by 3 to produce the 33% duty CPU clock, with an additional 4 MHz crystal to maintain that clock signal for peripherals that required it, and the video board receiving its own 24 MHz crystal to maintain the same image size and scan frequencies at both processor speeds.
In October 1985, AT&T launched the 6300 Plus
The version of Simultask included with the 6300 Plus was based on Locus Computing Corporation's Merge software.[10][16] In order to allow MS-DOS applications to run as "concurrent UNIX tasks", a non-standard hardware unit known as OS Merge was provided, allowing DOS applications to "think" that they had "complete control over the system" and offering "almost complete compatibility with IBM PC software", with a reported performance penalty when running applications such as Microsoft Flight Simulator of around 15 percent.[17] Such additional hardware was necessary to support these virtualisation features due to the limitations of the 80286.[18] The PC 6300 Plus shipped with MS-DOS in 1985 though, because its Unix System V distribution would not be ready until the end of March 1986.[19] The 6300 Plus did not sell as well as the original 6300.[20] Forrester Research estimated in December 1986 that AT&T's financial losses in PC market were about $600M for the year.[20]
In 1986, AT&T began offering 3.5" 720 KB floppies and 20 MB hard disks. The Xerox 6060 came standard with a single 360 KB 5.25" drive and a 20 MB hard drive. An Iomega Bernoulli 10/10 removable cartridge drive was also offered as a factory option, as well as a "small expansion" sidecar hosting a hard drive for users who found themselves with no internal space left between floppies and expansion cards.
After the 6300 Plus, AT&T announced that it was turning over both production and development of its PC products to
6300s made in 1986-1987 have BIOS Version 1.43 which added proper support for 3.5" floppies and fixed a number of bugs. As with all contemporary systems, a BIOS upgrade required a physical chip replacement, which AT&T provided for $35.[24]
Features
The M24 was designed to be highly compatible with
The system was designed "split-level", with the motherboard screwed onto the underside of the computer case and connected to the ISA bus backplane in the top section of the case via the video card which, rather than occupying an ISA slot, has two female edge connectors and plugs onto the ends of both the motherboard and the backplane, doubling as a bridge between them. The M24 has seven 8-bit ISA slots, as were standard for its time, but a number of slots (exact figure seeming to vary between one and at least four across extant machines) have proprietary second connectors to accept Olivetti-specific 16-bit cards. The machine had the bad luck of launching just a few months before the IBM PC/AT, which introduced the entirely different 16-bit connector and signalling standard extension to the PC bus now known simply as "ISA", and so ended up featuring slots incompatible on all three fronts of physical configuration, complement and arrangement of signals, and data transfer rate, significantly restricting the number of compatible 16-bit cards produced for it.
CGA compatible video card
The M24/6300 had an unusual enhanced 32 KB
CGA compatibility was necessarily limited to "RGB" modes, and "well behaved" software that only used the BIOS-preset modes and didn't attempt too much clever direct reprogramming of the CRTC registers (including setting of pseudo-text hack modes like 160×100 16 colours), as there was no
Some plasma-screen and early
Keyboard
Olivetti produced 2 official keyboards for the M24
- Keyboard 1 - ANK 2463 (With 83 keys)
- Keyboard 2 - ANK 2462 (With 92 keys)
The keyboard used a proprietary 9-pin D-sub connector built into the system board and had the unconventional option of plugging a mouse into the keyboard via another 9-pin D-sub connector. The mouse could be configured to simulate the usage of the keyboard's arrow keys in DOS applications without mouse support, aided by the choice of a parallel quadrature encoding design (as per the Microsoft Bus Mouse, Amiga, and Atari ST mice, all of which can be modified to work with the 6300) instead of the latterly more common 9-pin serial transmission.
Reception
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (February 2014) |
A January 1985 review in
A November 1985 review in
The initial model of the AT&T 6300 (no hard disk and only 360K floppy) had slow sales in 1984 with only 28500 sold compared to 1.5 million IBM PCs.[30] The sales were not much better in the first three months of 1985, with only 8500 sold in that time period.[2] If fact, worldwide sales of the Olivetti M24 were only 42000 in the first year, well below the planned production capacity of 200000.[31] As a result, AT&T introduced the faster models with hard drive and a math co-processor in March.[2] Still, after about one year on the market, AT&T had only claimed about 1% of the PC market, on par with that of TeleVideo and Columbia Data Products, but well below that of Compaq and Kaypro.[3] By December 1986 however, AT&T's PC line (including the 6300 Plus, described below) put it in the fourth place in terms of market share in the US.[20]
Olivetti's M24 did much better in Europe, where it became the market leader in 1986.[32] The company produced almost half a million M24 machines that year, about 200000 of which went to the United States.[33] As it claimed the crown of most PC machines sold in Europe that year, Olivetti also became the third largest PC manufacturer worldwide.[33] Olivetti would however be unable to repeat the feat in the subsequent years, and so 1986 represents the company's apogee in terms of PC market share.[33]
The 6300 was also supported by Unix-based operating systems particularly by Venix/86 Encore, released in September 1984,[34] and by a version of Xenix adapted for the machine by the Santa Cruz Operation, and announced in June 1985.[35]
Successors in Olivetti's product line
In response to IBM's launch of their
See also
- AT&T UNIX PC (7300)
- Computing for All, a French government plan to introduce computers to the country's pupils
- Olivetti M19
- Polaroid Palette[37]
References
- ^ "Olivetti M-24 @ Computer Museum .it". Computermuseum.it. Retrieved 2016-04-01.
- ^ ISSN 0199-6649.
- ^ ISSN 0010-4841.
- ^ a b "PC Mag". Books.google.com. 1985-11-12. p. 112. Retrieved 2016-04-01.
- ^ Xerox 6060 review in Byte Magazine Volume 11 Number 09, (September 1986) pp. 275-278
- ^ "Zweites Bein im amerikanischen Mikromarkt:: Olivetti liefert auf OEM-Basis M24-Mikro auch an Xerox". Computerwoche.de. 1985-05-10. Retrieved 2016-04-01.
- ^ "PERSONA 1600 Logabax".
- ^ "Logabax histoire". www.silicium.org.
- ^ "Olivetti-Mikro verfügbar". Computerwoche.de. 1985-11-22. Retrieved 2016-04-01.
- ^ from the original on 2020-02-10. Retrieved 2020-02-10.
- ^ McCarthy, Michael (1985-07-15). "AT&T Tests 8300 AT Clone/UNIX Box". InfoWorld. Vol. 7, no. 28. p. 13.
- ^ Petrosky, Mary (1985-10-07). "AT&T PC AT Compatible Waits for Multiuser Xenix". InfoWorld. Vol. 7, no. 40. p. 15.
- ^ 6300 Plus: Paradoxical computer a poor value InfoWorld 21 Jul 1986, p. 42
- ^ With Simultask, 6300 Plus Is Transformed. Providing Cost-Effective Access to Unix System V, MS-DOS, InfoWorld 29 Sep 1986, pp. 54-55
- ISSN 0888-8507.
- 6300 Plus, according to Judi Uttal, director of marketing for Locus. […]
- ^ "AT&T's 80286-based System Merges UNIX with MS-DOS". Byte. December 1985. p. 38. Retrieved 2021-09-17.
- PC 6300 Plus comes standard with special circuitry on the motherboard. This hardware is activated with Simultask to prevent programs from interfering with one another when they are running simultaneously. This is necessary because many MS-DOSprograms have complete control of the hardware. Simultask uses this circuitry to ensure that, no matter what one program does, other programs that are running simultaneously will not be affected. Other computers can't provide this assurance. […]
- from the original on 2020-02-10. Retrieved 2020-02-09.
- ^ ISSN 0199-6649.
- ISSN 0199-6649.
- ^ ISSN 0199-6649.
- ISSN 0010-4841.
- ISBN 1-56529-932-9.
- ^ "The Museum". Old-Computers.Com. Archived from the original on 2007-05-07. Retrieved 2016-04-01.
- ^ PERSONAL COMPUTER POCKET SERVICE GUIDE, Volume 1, 6th Edition (PDF). OP Computers S.p.A. p. 8.
- ^ "Olivetti M21/M24 Theory of Operation" (PDF). Bitsavers.de. 1984. Retrieved 2018-07-11.
- ISSN 0199-6649.
- ^ Grady, Jerry (May 1985). The Compaq Deskpro. Byte Magazine. pp. 260–267.
- Creative ComputingVolume 11 Number 06 (June 1985), pp. 32-34
- ISBN 978-0-87584-369-8.
- ISBN 978-0-02-402690-3.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-19-993670-0.
- ISSN 0010-4841.
- ^ Byte Magazine Volume 10 Number 06: Programming Techniques (June 1985), p. 42
- ^ "Olivetti kontert PS2-Announcement des Marktführers:: Neue PC-Familie nach altem Standard". Computerwoche.de (in German). 1987-07-03. Retrieved 2016-04-01.
- ^ "Olivetti-Mikro verfügbar". channelpartner.de. 1985-11-22. Archived from the original on 2016-11-24. Retrieved 2016-11-24.
Further reading
- Bob Troiano's review of the AT&T PC 6300, BYTE, December 1985, page 294-302
- The Man who Plots AT&T's Computer Strategy, InfoWorld, April 15, 1985, p. 16
- Bancaditalia.it
External links
- Olivetti M24 - A look inside the computer on YouTube
- Olivetti Keyboard 1 - ANK 2463 on YouTube
- Olivetti Keyboard 2 - ANK 2462 on YouTube
- Olivetti M24SP on YouTube
- Olivettim24.hadesnet.org
- Old-Computers.com - AT&T PC 6300
- https://web.archive.org/web/20090515115421/http://home.online.no/~kr-lund/olivetti.htm
- AT&T product announcement brochure for the 6300 Plus
- M24 SP brochure (in German)
- The AT&T PC 6300: A Retrospective on YouTube
- Bitsavers.trailing-edge.com
- Web.archive.org