Hello its blogging time once again and its vintage computer time again! In the previous entry, I made an April Fools Day post about my made up Commodore 128 MS-DOS Cartridge, and while it was fake, I mentioned Commodore DID actually make IBM compatibles and I would make up for posting a fake item by talking about a real one. Well I'm making true on my promise because that's what were looking at today, and the particular model we're looking at is the Commodore PC 30-III.
Released in 1989, The PC 30-III was one in a long line of Commodore IBM compatible PC's designed to get Commodore into the PC compatible market.
Now Commodore isn't a name that you associate with IBM Compatibles as they're more famous for machines like the PET, VIC-20, C64, and Amiga, but Commodore did get into the market and sold IBM compatibles.
Why did Commodore make a series of IBM compatibles? Well the answer traces back to 1984. You see Commodore had a problem, While the VIC-20 and C64 were market successes, They really limited Commodore to the home market and they hadn't really had any success in the business and education market since the PET.
The problem was, the PET had already been discontinued by that point, and the Commodore Plus4, A machine Commodore launched in 1984 to target the business market, had failed miserably due to its price point (Being the same as the C64 at $299 dollars), reliability problems, and its hardware and software (Including its built in version of TriMicro's 3+1 buisness software suite) were not suitable for most business users.
Despite the Plus/4's failure, Commodore were still eager to get back into the business market, It was also clear to them that the IBM PC's dominance in the business market was growing substantially, and compatible clones like the Compaq Portable, were very successful. So it became clear to Commodore that IBM compatibles were where the business market was and that making an IBM compatible of their own, was the way to go.
Introduced by Commodore in 1982, this was a series of commuters intended to be a successor to the PET. Much like the PET there were 2 versions of these computers, a P series and a B Series, which were meant for the home market and the business market respectfully. The P series machines were more along the lines of the C64, Equipped with the same VIC-II video chip, SID sound chip, Atari compatible joystick ports, and IEC serial port for disk drives and printers, and the B series machines were more along the lines of the Commodore PET with the same MOS 6545 CRTC chip for monochrome 80 column text, IEEE 488 parallel port for for disk drives and printers, and the option of having a built in green screen monitor.
Originally, Commodore was planning to sell Zilog Z80 and Intel 8088-based coprocessor boards to allow the CBM-II series to run CP/M and MS-DOS 1.25, as well as selling a version of the B128-80 with a built in 8088. However due to the CBM-II line failing in the market place, the fact that they were not fully IBM compatible, and difficulties getting the card to work with the system, The 8088 co processor board never made it out of the prototype stage, and the B128-80 with a built in 8088 was never released.
Then in 1983, Commodore proposed a deal with Intel to become a second-source manufacturer for the Intel 8088 and other X86 chips, allowing them to produce the chips at their MOS chip fab, however deal ended up falling through. They were also trying to strike a deal to rebrand the Dynalogic Hyperion as a Commodore product, But other than some marketing materials and a test model with the Commodore branding, However, that also ended up falling through.
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Finally Commodore decided to make and IBM compatible on their own, rather than rebrand one, and get 8088 chips from Seimens rather than through Intel. The result was the PC 10, launched in 1984, at $1,395.
Or was it? It turns out that, much like the Laser computer line, The history of Commodore's line of PC compatibles is a bit fuzzy. While Wikipedia lists the PC 10 as being introduced in 1984, If you look at this issue of RUN magazine from June of 1987, It says the computer had been released in EUROPE several years earlier (presumably in 1984), and had only recently come out in the US.
Also Wikipedia lists the PC 5, The PC 10, and the PC 20 as being the inital models coming out in 1984, but I dont think thats the case because the Commodore wordmark on the PC-10 and PC 20 is the one Commodore used from 1964-1984 (Yes Commodore has been around for a while!), but the PC 5 uses the wordmark used from 1984-1994.
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On the right side you have the keyboard connector and the reset button. Its actually the same type of reset button used on the Plus/4 and Commodore 128.
And on the back you have the power switch, the power plug, a mouse connector, RCA audio out, a serial port, a parallel port and covers for the 4 expansion slots with one being taken up by the video card. Another interesting fact is on some Commodore PC's, including this one I believe, the mouse port is actually designed to use an Amiga mouse, so you can share the mouse between systems.
The keyboard is pretty much is what you'd expect from a computer keyboard of this era: An IBM Model M style 101 key keyboard. So unlike the original IBM Model F and other earlier IBM Compatible keyboards, the Layout is pretty muck exactly the same as a modern PC keyboard.
Another interesting fact is that it seems that Commodores PC keyboards, were made by Cherry. Now Cherry is a very familiar name for many keyboard enthusiasts as their very well known for their MX key switches which they still sell today, and indeed, the Commodore PC 5 and PC 10 did use Cherry MX Black switches (And presumably the PC 30-III's does as well).
Many consider the older MX Black switches superior to modern ones, as the modern ones are less smooth, So these keyboards are at least decent to type on.
For monitors, while you can use any RGB EGA monitor, Quite a few Commodore PC's were paired with the Commodore 1084, used with the C64 and C128, And being that the C128 also had an RGBI port for 80 column video, that's not surprising. Also the video card is compatible with RGBI, and will look at the card in more detail later.
Booting up the computer is the same as booting any IBM PC or compatible of the day, insert your DOS disk into Drive A, insert your program disk into Drive B, and turn the computer on. The computer will then preform a memory size check (counting how much RAM is available), let out a beep, and drop you to a BIOS screen booting the DOS disk in Drive A. Now Commodore did provide an OEM version of MS DOS 4.01, But since it requires some set up, Im just going to stick to 3.20. Also Ive been having trouble configuring the drive to work like they would have on the real PC 30-III, and being that the only software I have is for 360k disks thats also what will be looking at. Now, one of the less cool things about the machine is that the post finish noise is different from the earlier Commodore PCs. Older models actually used the old Commodore PET power noise as a post finish beep, But on this one its just a regular beep. Lame!
In terms of storage, You have the previously mentioned floppy drives, but it was possible to instala special IDE hard drive as well.
Inside the machine is an Intel 80286 clocked at 12 MHz, 640K of RAM, a Faraday FE3020 based chipset, 4 ISA expansion slots and an ATI EGA Wonder 800+ video card, capable of displaying MDA, CGA, EGA & Hercules graphics modes. Interestingly, on the board it also says its used in the PC 40-III as well, The only difference is that machine came with 1 MB of RAM.
Now while the machine does run at 12 MHz you can change the speed of the processor in a menu system. The 8088 Commodore PC's had the ability to change speeds by pressing CTRL,ALT and S,T,or D. S was Standard at 4.77 MHz, T was Turbo at 7.16 MHz, and D was Double at 9.54 MHz. But this machine just has a standard BIOS menu, Also Lame!
The video card is also less interesting to me, The older ATI cards in the Commodore computers actually were compatible with the Plantronics Color Plus graphics modes used in video card of the same name, which was a unique 16 color card similar to EGA, but with different video modes and incompatible with it.
However, The ATI EGA Wonder 800+, is just a regular EGA card, Which is just boring! However, it does at least have a few neat things that it can do. For one thing, it can display Hercules Graphics, allowing it to display High resolution 720x350 graphics on an IBM 5151 or third party MDA monitor, something the typical MDA card couldn't do.
Now Ive mentioned this graphics mode in the past, and it was certainly a popular third party video card. The original Hercules card was created in 1982 by Hercules Computer Technology, Inc of Hercules California.
The origin of the card is a tale thats the embodyment of the phrase, Neccesity is the mother of invention. The card was created by Van Suwannukul after he purchased an IBM PC.
You see, Suwannukul had a problem, He was trying to write his his doctoral thesis on the IBM PC, but he spoke in wrote in Thai. The problem was the MDA Card was not cappable of displaying bitmaps necessary for redefining characters, and CGA was incompatible with MDA. So he created the Hercules card, not only making it possible to display MDA text, but make each pixel addressible in order to display graphics.
After forming Hercules Computer Technology with Kevin Jenkins, the card was released to the public and became quite popular with businesses, as a way to have the benifits of MDA with the ability to display graphics without a CGA card. The only problem was the Hercules card was not CGA compatible due the differences in hardware and video addressing. While you could get third party CGA emulation programs like SimCGA, they could still have compatibility problems with certain software.
Thats were the ATI Wonder card line comes in, as these cards could display CGA on MDA without the need of an emulation program, allowing it to work with any software you through at it. To demonstrate it I'm going to set the MDA compatible CGA mode on and play a CGA game on it, In this case Orion Softwares PC-Man.
Well apart from some sound glitches, Id say it worked pretty well. so this card had the advantage of giving you High Resolution MDA text and Hercules Graphics, but also allowed you to run programs for CGA and EGA on a monochrome monitor. So you could do productive things like get sharp graphs for your spreadsheets in Lotus 123, and goof off in your spare time with games like PC-Man, Burgertime, or Donkey Kong in CGA as well!
So overall, I think that will I may not find the entirely sold on the more generic PC 30-III, It still does have some neat feature that make it, and Commodore's other PC clones a unique footnote in the history of personal computers. That's all I have for today, and as always, Thanks for reading! See you next time!
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