Rainbow "Turbow" & other mods -- do they still have any value?

[Fellini 8.5]

Spring cleaning time, go figure, and I'm deciding if I want to take the trouble of parting out and selling off my poor old little girl, who has been banished to the attic for so many years.

Back around 1991, I tricked out a Rainbow 100+ (might be a B chassis that I stuffed + parts in) with all the stuff I could get my hands on, graphics, max ram, 20(40?)mb 1/2-height HD, 3-1/2" floppy, Click-clock, and the Turbow-286 w/ Windows 3.0 upgrade. And I've got other misc boatanchors like the vertical stand, LA50, color and B&W monitor (can't remember if I actually did the dual-monitor thing) and boxes of discs and ribbons and docs and lord knows what anymore...

It's all been stored in an attic for about 10 years, and hasn't been powered up for probably 13.

I don't see any recent buzz about the Turbow with a quick Google search (no results at all in here), so I guess I'm wondering if it's worth my time to try and eBay this thing (or the key parts)?

 

[Terry Yager]

Sounds like you have a very unique and complete system, maybe even the only one of it's kind still existing. DEC stuff seems to sell pretty well on eBay, so your souped-up Rainbow should fetch quite a handsome price. Just be sure to describe it as completely as possible, and include lots of pictures. I wouldn't be surprized if it sells for over $300.00 myself (how much over depends on the idiosynchracies of eBay).

--T

 

[Micom 2000]

I have a DEC Rainbow+ with a color monitor which I dearly love. While I wouldn't bid to such astronomical prices as your system may gender, I'm interested in the Turbow upgrade references. Was this a hardware or software thing. One can occasionally find chunks of information from the DEC Rainbow BBS conference, but I've never heard of this. Any info would be appreciated. Win 3.0 on a DEC Rainbow would be mind-bending.

Lawrence

 

[Fellini 8.5]

DEC stuff seems to sell pretty well on eBay, so your souped-up Rainbow should fetch quite a handsome price. (...) I wouldn't be surprized if it sells for over $300.00 myself (how much over depends on the idiosynchracies of eBay).

Well, that's more than I figured on, which is kind of surprising. Then again, the amount of $$ I spent collecting all that stuff in the first place is probably rather embarrassing, though I greatly enjoyed the "chase" at the time.

I have a DEC Rainbow+ with a color monitor which I dearly love. While I wouldn't bid to such astronomical prices as your system may gender, I'm interested in the Turbow upgrade references. Was this a hardware or software thing. One can occasionally find chunks of information from the DEC Rainbow BBS conference, but I've never heard of this. Any info would be appreciated. Win 3.0 on a DEC Rainbow would be mind-bending.

And time-warping at that. It was a bit of a chugging beast, but it ran a terminal and the equivilants of MSPaint and Wordpad in 2-color CGA (or was it EGA?) glory. There was a mouse driver too, though you needed to hook it up to an A/B switch along with the modem in order to use the terminal.

The LA50 printed out everything from those programs just fine (fonts & graphics) as I recall, just like the old Apple Imagewriter.

The Turbow-286 was an add-on card that (and my memory is failing me because it's been over 15 years since I installed it so I could be wrong) plugged into where the 8087 co-processor would go. You needed to load a TSR at boot to enable it. The other add-on card was the Click-Clock, which I can't really remember where that plugged in. But it essentially kept system time so you wouldn't have to keep entering it in every time you booted.

I think the company's name that provided all this was called "Suitable Solutions", or something like that. They had a trade-in program where I sent them a bunch of official software I had (Like Lotus 123), and got credit towards the various items in their catalog.

I remember I had Tetris on there, too, but I don't remember if the Turbow helped or hindered it... Anyway, I used that thing a all the time until I finally needed to buy a 486 to run Photoshop (and Doom II... and eventually Slackware) on.

Just thinking about all this again is giving me quite a nostalgia hit. I fear if I unearth it and plug it in to test it out, I'll want to keep it...