bard@brigid.cs.cornell.edu (Bard Bloom) (08/11/90)
For sale or gift:
One DEC Rainbow named Macchiata, DEC's technically superior but
ill-advertised competitor to the IBM PC.
- 896Kbytes of memory! Much, much more than the PC's 64 maximum!
- DEC's standard, much-talked-about keyboard! Sometimes people even say
good things about it!
- Two 400Kbyte disk drives!
- Both 8086 and Z80 processors, sharing memory!
- Somewhat PC-DOS compatible!
- Built-in VT100 terminal software. Even if all your disks get trashed, or
you decide that you can't deal with either MS-DOS or CP/M, you can still
use it as a terminal up to 9600 baud!
- Loads of sofware that was, at the time, pretty darn good.
* Final Word V.2 Word Processor: very very programmible test editor and
Scribe-like formatter/typesetter
* Turbo Pascal V.3
* Kermit, which makes the built-in terminal even better, and is pretty
much all I ran on Macchiata for the last three years.
* Djinn, a directory editor and shell environment which is better than
anything available even now on Unix.
* Mix C, from an obscure software company which I hope you've never heard
of. Usable if you're trying to learn C.
* Several games which are *not available on any computer system produced
today*. Nowhere. They require the special capabilities of the
Rainbow to run.
* A wide variety of freeware and shareware programs, many of them
documented.
* Usual MS-DOS stuff!
- LP-50 dot matrix printer. Good shape. Has some funky fonts, including
Japanese, built in. Font editor and miniature text formatter included in
the software above, as are some elegant and some slimy fonts.
- Documentation! Manuals for almost everything! Source code for some
things!
- MS-DOS system calls manual, never successfully used!
- Large numbers of disks, some of them never used! For no extra cost,
information about how to format them! (Use the undocumented /I flag to
FORMAT.)
Price:
- I will give Macchiata to any charitable organization which I approve of
for no more than shipping costs (and possibly less).
- Otherwise best offer, which must must at least cover shipping costs and
be worth more to me than having a spare terminal in the closet.
-- Bard Bloom.