Olivetti M24

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An AT&T 6300, circa 1996.
On the screen the game Rogue.

The Olivetti M24 was a computer sold by Olivetti in 1983 using the Intel 8086 CPU.[1]

Olivetti did not directly sell the system in the United States, but both AT&T and Xerox bought rights to rebadge the system as the AT&T 6300[2] and the lesser-known Xerox 6060.

Contrary to other PC clones of that era, the M24 was highly compatible with IBM PC. One of its characteristics was the use of the more powerful 8MHz Intel 8086 CPU rather than the 4.77MHz Intel 8088 used in IBM's own PC XT [3] while allowing the installation of the 8087 math co-processor.

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 two of the slots have proprietary second connectors to accept Olivetti 16-bit cards.

The initial release of the AT&T 6300 came with two 360k 5.25" floppy drives, later systems had the option of adding a 20MB hard drive and swapping out the remaining 5.25" drive for a 720k 3.5" floppy drive. The Xerox 6060 came standard with a single 360k 5.25" drive and a 20MB hard drive.

The keyboard used a proprietary 9-pin D-Sub connector built into the system board and had the unusual 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.

The Olivetti M24 used a 640x400 pixel graphic mode in monochrome and color. This was much better than screen devices on the IBM PC, where the resolution in color was only 320x200 pixels.

References

  1. ↑ http://www.computermuseum.it/museum/Olivetti_M-24.htm
  2. ↑ http://home.online.no/~kr-lund/olivetti.htm
  3. ↑ http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=535

External links

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