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Massive DEC Rainbow 100 Find

M

mikerm

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 6, 2010
Messages
282
Location
Grand Rapis, MI
I was bored, surfing on Craigslist one day and hit the free section. Posted there was an add for a DEC Rainbow 100. Cool I thought, I've never had one of those before.

Set up to pick it up the next weekend, Sunday. I drove over just outside of town to pick it up, and what I saw almost made me fall over. The ad said the computer, some software, and a printer.

Well, what was actually there was 5 boxes of nothing but DEC stuff. I'm glad I bought a truck. It filled up my double cap and most of my bed. I couldn't believe just the sheer mass amounts of stuff that was sitting there waiting for me. It turns out that the lady I got it from was a DEC employee here in Albuquerque!

Here are lots of pictures if anyone is interested: http://www.mikeslab.net/files/DEC/

I was just overwhelmed. I double checked to make sure they didn't want any money and they confirmed. I couldn't believe it. This by far was the most spectacular pickup.

Anyway, the pictures show that I have way, way, way too much and I don't know what to do with most of it, especially the PDP-8 and PDP-11 books, so I will be posting most of it for free. The extra boxed monitors and such will be available for the price of shipping.

So, the star of the show; This puppy is completely upgraded. It has a color monitor, 5MB Seagate MFM, the high end color graphics card, and a whopping 512K of RAM. In the link above has pictures of it, and the original employee receipt!

Even better, I ended up with employee only stuff like DEC Employee catalogs and internal Rainbow documentation. Don't worry, I'm going to try to get all of the information out as much as humanly possible when I can. I'm still overwhelmed a week later about just how much there is to go through.

There are two memorable computer pickups now. One was middle of the night in the crappy part of El Paso, TX, and now this one. :D
 
Thanks! It's been interesting learning all about the Rainbow. Especially how proprietary and limited it is, haha.
 
Would it be possible to upload the 4.03 A firmware? I have problems with my machine and would like to verify the ROMs (3 x 2732)...
 
That's a very nice 100A! It looks to be in rather clean shape cosmetically. The VR241 is especially nice (my VR241's have corroded connectors).

I do take offense at saying it's "proprietary and limited." ;) Its cables are mostly proprietary externally, but whose weren't at the time? The inner daughterboard concept certainly didn't encourage third-party cards to be developed, but there were a few. The floppy disk format was proprietary-ish, but, again, whose wasn't? Luckily the floppy controller just uses a stock 1793 controller chip, so you can attach an IBM-compatible 360KB or 720KB drive on it (with a driver for DOS, of course) without any issues. It was never built to be IBM compatible, so you can't hold that against it.

Of course, I'm highly biased towards the Rainbow...
 
PrintStar said:
Luckily the floppy controller just uses a stock 1793 controller chip, so you can attach an IBM-compatible 360KB or 720KB drive on it (with a driver for DOS, of course) without any issues.
Click to expand...

Interesting as mine is labeled FDC1799. While available SMC controller documentation describes FDC1791 thru FDC1797 I've not yet been able to find any documentation for the FDC 1799. One assumes commonality with what appears to be a family ...

Can you explain? Thanks!

paul
 
I haven't the slightest clue about the differences in chips. However, from the Rainbow's point of view, they're all the same, I'm guessing. There wasn't an "alternative" or "upgraded" floppy controller ever built for the machines.
 
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