Wow. I designed the graphics card. This video is a real trip down memory lane. I share a patent for the circuit that lets the card take low-level register programming of the graphics card, determine the software's desired format, and provide full compatibility at 400 lines instead. There was an add-on graphics expansion board I did that could plug in and get the system to 640x400 16 colors. I think only Olivetti sold it. The systems were also sold as the Xerox PC, and by Logabax.
That is really cool! I just finally got my hands on a DEB after 30 years; I look forward to trying it out, although there wasn't much software that took advantage of it, unfortunately.
For the DEB, the request was for "more graphics". They didn't really know what that should be. I added bit-planes and a color lookup table, resulting in 16 simultaneous colors. IBM compatible software didn't know about the bit-planes, so it didn't use them. It did have a cool feature, where two blink clocks went to the LUT as addresses, yielding four-phase blinking in up to four arbitrary colors.
I recall that the AT&T/Olivetti monitors did not use the same timing as the IBM monitors, and so in order to retain compatibility with software that would write to the CRT controller timing registers (MC6845 I believe) there was a address decode logic and ROM or PAL on the card that intercepted those particular writes and changed the data to the correct value.
Yeah, I've ended up reading up on that stuff pretty much by accident as I've been skimming the manuals for techie details about the output format (I've been trying to get details on old ~25khz monitor machines for a certain thought exercise and finding the details extremely hard to pin down). The system was officially called the "scrambler", and the explanation of how it works, and the formulae that it used to munge direct attempted-writes-to-CGA-registers by even the most badly behaved software into something that would still work on its own monitor went _wayyyy_ over my head. There's some pretty complex algebra in there. Extremely clever stuff. I had a similar experience looking through the DEB programming guide, it was a bewilderingly capable piece of kit for an early 80s RGBI-compatible video board, including the multi-layer/multi-plane blending system and the interesting built-in multicolour dithering and flashing that gave you an easy way to work around the limitations of that colour system and draw images which simulated a higher colour depth. It's essentially the ultimate evolution of a CGA-type board... something of a pity both that it never really got the popularity or recognition it deserved (being overshadowed by the arguably not-really-any-better EGA), or that IBM didn't have the resources and technology to build something like that (or indeed the 8MHz 8086 and 16-bit expansion slots) right into the original PC. (the next bit kinda warrants being a second post to make things more easily readable, if you'll indulge me)
My first job as a lad at Olivetti in 1986 was re-aligning the floppy drives in those things. I remember all the techies running flight sim on it at lunchtime!
I used to have a PC 6300 - I was just thinking about it, and found this video. Imagine my surprise when I saw your machine - I'm the previous owner that modded that machine for the 3.5 inch floppy!
I had one of these, passed down to me from my dad. I loved that machine! Too bad AT&T didn't continue making machines, because the 6300 was well built, and lasted me many, many years without repairs before it died. The only machine I ever cried over was that 6300, it was like I lost a close friend! I used to play LHX Attack Chopper, Overlord, M1 Abrams Tank Platoon, and Starflight 1 & 2
The quality of this video is way way way higher than most of anything on youtube, this might as well been a documentary or something. it was excellent.
Through the years I've bought, played with and resold many old PC's, but of all of them the AT&T 6300 is the one I've regularly kicked myself for not keeping. It was a fine machine. I used it for word processing and spreadsheets, which the 6300 handled quickly and efficiently. The high-res screen was easy on the eyes and the overall design was excellent. Thanks for this great retrospective.
I had the pleasure of servicing a few of these machines at the computer store I worked at back in 1999ish. There were quite a few in the area, not a surprise as the store was located in the same town as "the" Bell Labs. Yes, they were still in service, a testament of their build quality. We specialized in repairing legacy equipment where other stores would turn away customers. Not too many stores back then would touch anything earlier then a 486.
Because I wrote the script of what I was going to say before recording, the CC was easy to create; youtube allows you to upload text to increase accuracy. I'm glad it was worth it and helped you.
Pretty cool! I had an M24 that my father brought home, similar story! That opened a whole new world of computing with the whopping 10MB hard drive it had. I wish I'd kept it, I had fond memories of the quiet AC fan and blinking LEDs. I now have an Olivetti ETV-260 word processor that I'm restoring. There sure is something about that Italian design that sure was quality.
I remember having one in high school in 1987 or so. I remember we had dual 5 1/4 floppies, 720k of memory and a 20mb or so hard card (if I recall correctly it didn't save things like a hard drive does so when the pc was turned off..you lost everything on it. I never saw another one and friends that came over couldn't believe how useful it was till I showed them) in it. I never actually saw a mouse for one till this video. I remember it would run circles around the IBM's at school. When I was programming games in basic at school and brought them home to work on, I had to slow them down to make them playable on the pc6300. Loved the video and thanks for bringing back some great memories.
As a teenager I got one of these at a thrift store for $15 complete EXCEPT for the keyboard. I ended up taking the hard drive and controller out and putting it in my leading edge model D. I always wished I had a keyboard to have been able to use the 6300. Great video!!
That was a great video, and what a wonderful trip down memory lane. I was with AT&T in the PC6300/3B2 era, and worked with many customers and trade shows. In fact on wroe one of the first TSR's for a screen saver, that was published in a book "The Fully Powered PC", for all IBM PC compatibles, circa 1980's. Well done video!
I found one used and loved it. Well built. It went away decades ago. I went crazy looking for the AT&T PC 6300 version of AutoCAD. I ran early AutoCAD on it but those versions did not exploit the superior graphics available and I didn't get a mouse with mine. That I would like to see/have running one day.
My video equipment may have misrepresented things, sorry. The AT&T 6300 did NOT produce more than 4 colors in 320x200 at a single time as it was a CGA clone and held to those rules. CGA had six different 320x200 palettes that changed the latter three colors, and the first color could be any of the 16 (but was typically black). Check MobyGames for King's Quest screenshots to see non-typical CGA palettes (as well as true 16-color 160x200 composite output).
One of the odd things about the graphics system, at least from everything I've read, is that if you add extra memory to it... you can get extra colours in both 640x400 and 640x200, but still not 320x200, and it still doesn't do anything such as automatically converting composite-colour graphics into a 160x200 mode with RGBI colours chosen to be close as possible to the artefact colours. Still, you can't have it all. I think the reason given was something to do with how the 640 modes were natively 1-bit monochrome, as a monolithic bitplane, and it was therefore easy to just add extra bitplanes in the piggybacked memory banks, whereas low-rez was a messy interleaved 2-bitplane setup that would have been a complete pain in the butt to try and extend (even on top of what they'd already done to build the full-colour 400-line modes) as you'd essentially have to duplicate that layout and simultaneously decode it to get 16 colours. Simpler to just use the memory as extra pages for the base mode, and if 320x200 16c was desired, just emulate it with doubled-up pixels in 640x200, a bit like using 320x200 256c to emulate low-rez EGA on an MCGA card. Not sure what that might have meant for Plantronics/Tandy/PCjr or medium-rez EGA compatibility. Did anyone ever make a full-quality conversion of Thexder (which originated on a 640x200 3-bit RGB machine and so was one of the very few PC games, heck probably one of the few programs overall, to make use of 640x200 16c) for the expanded system, I wonder?
My first was the PC 6300 dual floppy with 640K Ram and an amber monochrome screen. Your description of the unboxing was almost exactly how it went for me. I was so disappointed to learn that when you turn it on, all you get is the A:\> command prompt and nothing more. I buckled down to learn Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar, file management, GWBASIC, and eventually Borland's Turbo Pascal. I also learned about making backup discs when I lost 2 years of data on automotive gas mileage. With a dot matrix printer and "sideways" printing software I felt invincible. I did the V30 upgrade and in those days it was huge since the microprocessor gained a lot of speed by prefetching the next command on the other side of the dual 16-bit bus. I also added the 8087 chip and that made a big difference in large Lotus 1-2-3 sheets. Finally, I was an AT&T employee at the time, and having an opportunity to read the schematics, learned the 2-megabyte memory expansion card was unnecessary since the mother board already was mapped for the next generation of memory chips. I simply bought a full set of memory ICs and flipped a few dip switches to get the full complement of expanded LIM Memory onboard. Both my kids learned computing on this machine and became very adept. I never installed the 10 MB hard drive as newer computers were coming along that had much larger HDs for the same cost. The modern 100 MB HDs were an unbelievable size, and I could never imagine filling one up. Keep in mind, before modern media files came along, one byte was more or less equivalent to one keystroke. I once calculated 100 MB of non-stop typing 90 words per minute would take about 42 years. As for games, I had the night mission pinball, flight simulator, and World Class Leader Board Golf. "Can't be too happy about that one Jim". thanks for the blast from the past.
Jim, this is awesome. I started working at BL in 1985 and my boss allowed me to take a 6300 to Georgia Tech as I completed my masters degree. Needless to say that I was like a King on campus with my own PC. This machine was awesome as you describe. Thank you so much for this excellent video and for the memories.
Thank you for a great video which brought back lots of memories about an AT&T 6300, my first PC I owned in the USA. My computer was fast but a bit flaky. I have learned to take it apart and put it back as re-seating the motherboard, bus board, and controller cables fixed the problem for some reason. It was highly compatible with IBM XT/AT. I wrote programs for my research projects and they ran on IBM ATs without problem.
Mine was a bit flaky as well, but I believe that's because I abused it quite a lot. The 6300 I currently have in my collection (the one in the video) is extremely stable.
I am happy to see that. I worked all on those hardware and software since 1984 and alos R&D in Italy (Olivetti) . I have actully 3B400 in Unix .My best part of my live .
That's very kind of you to say. It's on my list to redo someday, since the video was shot with a potato phone, and the music got removed by youtube for copyright. The remaster will go up on my @theoldskoolpc channel at some point.
My first computer was a PC 6300. My parents got it with 640KB of RAM, mono monitor, and two floppies (with the twist latches rather than the flip ones). We later got the ROM upgrade; a V30; a Hardcard, which died and was replaced with a hard drive installed in the second floppy bay (with some minor mods); some sort of "bus patch" board (iirc) and a jumper chip to disable the built-in display card (iirc) so we could install an Orchid ProDesigner II VGA card. I never knew what that 9 pin port on the keyboard was for until watching this video. We just got an ordinary Microsoft serial mouse. We also wound up replacing the keyboard with a clone, when the original died (iirc), which had function keys on both the top and the left side.
That's a super cool machine back in the day. Used to own one back in the early 90's and try to get another one but could not get my hands on a complete unit. I only manage to get a hold of a nice keyboard which end up in this video. True story.
Great descriptions of the 6300. Awesome job!! Alas, some of the novel proprietary features and strengths later became weaknesses. The "U-turn" design with the motherboard on the bottom and the expansion slots on top was convenient and compact, but added significant cost to the system when compared to other PC "clones" with much simpler chassis. The 6300 required three different circuit boards, four additional edge connectors, and additional intermediate sheet metal that all took their share in cutting into product margins. But perhaps the biggest early problem was the break with 16-bit PC-AT add-in card compatibility caused by the 6300 having its 16-bit extension located away from the 8-bit ISA connector and therefore 'standard' 16-bit add-in cards could not be used. Performance advantages were good, but short lived, as by 1985 PC and PC-AT clones with 8 MHz "turbo" modes were widely available. (with the 4.77 MHz speed option retained for compatibility). As noted, the 1.43 BIOS was required to support add-in video adapters. Using a 3rd party video adapter also required removing a chip from the 6300's built-in video adapter. Since the adapter shared with the U-turn function, it could not be readily removed to create 'video-less' skus for people who wanted to use 3rd party adapters. The video adapter thus became another 'cost overhead'. I recall The 1.43 BIOS also corrected a little 'eccentricity' with the system tick. The hardware used a different frequency for the UART clock (which was subsequently divided to create the interrupt that ultimately became the system 'tick') and the BIOS didn't configure the system to account for the difference, causing about 20 minutes per day of system-ticks to be 'lost'. Even though the 6300 included its own RTC, once MS-DOS got the time-of-day it relied on the system tick and people wondered why they were losing time when they left them running. The 16-bit connector, U-turn, and video adapters carried through to the follow-on '286-based 6300 Plus with its revolutionary 'Simultask' logic. But that additional logic was yet another overhead on those looking for just a faster AT clone from a major U.S. company. The quality of the double-scanned CGA and the crisp text display were big sellers and made the 6300 a major player for a while, but the design aspects that added cost, broke compatibility with the IBM PCs, and required proprietary cards and peripherals ultimately took their toll. (E.g. was having lights on the keyboard worth the cost of having a proprietary connection?) The lesson learned during those years was that you could differentiate by going beyond the IBM PC's capabilities, but not at the cost of compatibility and the ability to leverage the ecosystem of 3rd party vendors who were building for the PC. But it wasn't just a mistake made by Olivetti/AT&T. Companies such as Digital Equipment also tried to go the 'proprietary peripherals' route and paid for it. By the time that AT&T/Olivetti moved to making computers that had full compatibility, they had lost the opportunity to lead by being a proper (but full compatible) feature superset of the IBM offerings. Instead, that opportunity was taken by Compaq and their dedication to providing enhancements while preserving interoperability and compatibility with the PC.
Interesting video. I actually supervised an AT&T facility that repaired these PCs near Chicago in 1986. They repaired them like they did the phones next door. Rip the whole PC apart and refurbish the parts, then reassemble the now scrambled parts. You never knew what the original problem was, so you never were really sure of the repair. I didn't stay there very long.
The M20 is a good example of how market success can be a subjective thing depending on your location and occupation. It seems to have done poorly on a global basis, and I hadn't heard it before last week, but apparently it found a place on the desk of every tax accountant in Italy because of being one of the first systems to get a decent desktop accounting software package... to the point where they even gained a wake-on-ring remote power device that could start the computer in your office late at night when a central mainframe (possibly the Italian IRS? I forget, it was a bit of a skim) dialled in to send data back and forth. Not sure if it even had any popularity outside of Italy even in the rest of southern Europe, but there does seem to be at least still some enthusiasm for it, and for emulating the system. And of course, the M24 had an emulator card for the M20 available, with a custom video mode for that card built right in to the main video system...
I still have my much loved 6300. We obtained the side caddy with the 10 meg Hard drive (later hacked in a winchester 40) and replaced one of the 5 1/4 floppies with a 3.5 720. The last additiin was a Sota board that made it a quasi 286. One note about the screens, there was a third option of an amber monochrome version. Love the vid, cheers!
My dad also worked for AT&T and got us (him) a 6300 plus 286. I don't know the year. I think 83 or 84. had the small green screed originally. He upgraded it with an HDD I don;t know what size and a 1.2M FDD. When he upgraded that was my first computer in 7 or 88 or so. by then it had a 20MB HDD, 1024k extended ram, 1.2m fdd and a vga card and an NEC multisync monitor. I had the 84 key keyboard (with no number pad) and the mouse that plugged into the top of the keyboard. He also could get those membrane clear dust covers for the keyboard. Had an old external high speed modem. I remember playing sticky bear, kings quest, lemmings, and lode runner on it. External modem, back when you had to dial up an actual bbs board, not the general internet. Good times. I just bought a 6300 plus cpu4 barebones case off ebay, i'm gonna build a modern PC in it. Good times!
Thanks. I wish I had time to put together more videos; I'd love to do a similarly in-depth look at the IBM PCjr, but I'm involved with other projects right now.
We had one of these when I was in high school. We installed a 386sx daughter board in one of the slots and two 40 mb hard drives, one RLL and the other MFM. Brings back memories.
Astoundingly well-produced video! I saw a post of this video on the "Armchair Arcade" website, but admit that I had very little interest in the subject matter, since I was not enamored with the "MS-DOS" clones of that period. However, your detailed highlights of the superb engineering and capabilities of this machine kept me entranced throughout the duration of the video! I don't think anyone could possibly ask for a more informative and entertaining video on the AT&T 6300. Exceptional job!!!
Yeah, good memories. We had the Olivetti M24 and the identical (except for the color) Logabax 1600 at the University in Metz/France from 1985 up to 1990 (when I graduated, after that I don't know). We had it to learn programming in Turbo Pascal 3 and the funny thing is that I found a patch in a German magazine that replaced the 640x200 by the 640x400 mode. This gave me an edge over my colleagues for the graphical assignments we had (a chess board and CAD toolbox). I had also the luck to own an Atari Mega ST2 in which I had installed the PC-Speed emulator which allowed me to program for the M24 as the emulator supported the Olivetti mode and ran with a NEC V30 at 8MHz, so quite close to the real thing (a little bit faster as the V30 was closer to a 80186 than a 8086).
From TP 4.0 and later, they finally included an actual AT&T 6300 640x400 BGI driver, so that's how I ended up using that mode. These days, I look at the specs and see that it was possible to have 320x200x4 in two true video pages, and now I wonder if any game ever used that...
We had a AT&T 6300, It had 1 360k and 1 20mb hd. I recall it only having CGA, or at least in games like Sierra. I think Hercules MGA worked also. It was our 1st computer complete with the AT&T monitor. I wish I kept it now
My father also bought one in 1985. The model he bought had a 10MB C: hard drive and a 5 1/4" A: floppy as represented in your later model version, but no 3 1/2" floppy B: (I assume that came out later)... It was maxed out with 640KB RAM and sold bundled with an Okidata Microline dot matrix printer for the low price of $1999.99.
Never mind... Saw where you addressed the 3 1/2" floppy! It definitely was a great computer. We upgraded to a 40MB HD card and a 2400 baud internal modem in 1989... Eventually in 1991, it was time to upgrade, and we went with a cheap clone (as was common at the time) that could support newer upgrades. But, this machine definitely had a good run - especially for its time, when everything was changing so quickly.
Heh. I actually used a Programa 101 in high school. It was marketed as the Olivetti-Underwood Programa 101. I also use the PC 6300 while working at AT&T Network Systems in the 80's. It was a pretty good computer at the time.
I used a model M24 countless times in the mid-80's. It was a nice machine, and I liked it very much. Today I only have one pre-486 machine. A complete original Unisys Ps/2 series 300. Yup... Original down to the manual and BIOS software. Even have the original 1987 optical 3-button sperry mouse.
The keyboard was an Olivetti keyboard. At the time there were two schools of keyboard buff. Those who liked the rather "clicky" IBM typewriter keyboards and those who liked Olivetti's take that was softer. Professional typists generally preferred the keyboard they'd learned on. So the comment about the keyboard here is invidious. In Europe, Olivetti offered three monochrome monitors with green, white and orange phosphors. The serial port could be upgraded with a chip (an 8250 iirc) on the motherboard to allow synchronous communications. As far as I recall, this was only used for a few turnkey projects Olivetti did for large Italian customers such as Autostrade Srl. One problem of having two identical ports on the back was the (slightly) famous blown blue gun on the colour displays caused by people plugging them into the parallel port.
My first keyboard was the Olivetti keyboard which I used for five years. Later keyboards were clones. After that, I typed on an IBM buckling-spring keyboard and found it was the very best for me to type on, so for the last 20 years I've standardized on IBM "model-m" keyboards. I did not overlook the fact that the top and bottom came off the case, as there are several pictures of both in the video. I'm guessing you didn't finish the video, or only skimmed it.
In 1987, I was hired by a company that also gave me my first use of the PC (although I had a Commodore 64 at home). They gave me the AT&T 6300. I fell in love with it, and became pretty good with the 123 spreadsheet and WordPerfect 5.1 software. I've got a little museum of some of those early PCs on my channel. Still looking for one of those AT&T 6300s to add into it. Computers in the 80s, really cool huh? Ah, those old DOS days!! Great video, and thats for making it! -- Atco
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ God i miss the golden computing old times where gui's, actual ones, were made of characters like these ╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
The technical reference manual is available at seasip dot info. Appendix 1 says "In Text Mode, mouse movement will cause cursor key tokens to be inserted into the keyboard buffer." and section 2.3.3 describes how the mouse buttons generate keycodes. I remember you could use the NVR program to set the key codes generated by the mouse buttons. I seem to recall that enter and escape were the defaults but maybe I'm confusing it with the enter and forward-delete codes - section 2.4 says otherwise.
Due to get a 6300 soon - i'm stoked! Only real gotcha i've heard is that if the clock battery ruptures the whole board tends to go with it if any leakage at all hits the board.
That's true of all motherboards. At least with the 6300, if the battery explodes while the system is stored normally (upright), it just drips down onto the case.
So, my 6300 has arrived and only wants to boot to a 0 with a blinking underscore. I hate to bother you about this more, but you happen to know anything about that? The service manual i'm consulting doesn't say too much on the matter and i suspect either the memory is faulty or the DIP switches have been tampered with.
That is a catastrophic failure. You aren't even getting to the POST. Examine the motherboard for bad caps and exploded battery damage. Try rearranging the ram.
yeah, I think RAM issues may be the culprit. nothing obviously broken and the RTC is intact. three chips aren't of the same manufacture as the rest; could that cause issues? would improper DIPs cause a outright failure to post?
Very interesting video. Even though I was mostly using Atari and Commodore computers through the eighties, I have a wide spreed interest of all computers from this decade. Being hearing impaired, I also appreciate the subtitle (cc) option for this video. Thanks.
Wow. Thanks for the memories! Been a while since I had one of these. I was watching an episode of "MacGyver" that had a ton of them in it, so it prompted me to go look around and see what I could dig up on them ;)
I've seen them pop up in several episodes, but this particular one is in season two, "Phoenix Under Siege". MacGyver also has one at his house I believe.
I'm not at all surprised that flipped motherboards didn't catch on. Before SMT, motherboards were wave-soldered: the board passes over a wave of molten solder which adheres to all the pins of the components. Installing the card edge connectors on the reverse of the board would require them to be manually soldered onto the motherboard, and PC motherboards being dirt cheap, that would of taken an unacceptable cut into the manufacturer's margin. There is an altogether better model anyway: passive AT backplanes with the CPU and memory on a riser, but that didn't catch on except in industrial PCs, again because it was more expensive. Today PXI and VXS are superior form-factors to PCIe but for the same reason nobody is going out and building their desktop computers with it because of the added expense. I actually thought about doing it, but when I got quotes for buying a VXS backplane and compute board for an old VME chassis, I piked out because it was too expensive.
Thanks for the info! I'd add that passive AT backplanes with risers were also less desirable for consumers because they required more case real-estate.
The whole concern behind the design was allowing full access to the motherboard. 'Tis nice, and we didn't get into trouble with signal quality, though the main power distribution needed to be manly. It is a bit tall and heavy though. It did make it feel expensive, and it was a major investment for most folks.
I feel compelled to correct your claim at 6m44s. IBM released the AT 84-key keyboard in 1984 (not 1985!) -- a Model F (NOT Model M!) that had programmable LEDs for the CAPSLOCK, NUMLOCK, and SCROLLOCK keys. Kinda obscure, but factual nonetheless.
Thanks for the correction. I plan on revisiting the 6300 with a new video at a future date, and I'll be sure to have correct Model F information. I still feel compelled to point out that the M24 was designed with keyboard lights in '83, before the Model F 6450200 with LEDs was released.
Hi Jim, for the benchmarks did you install an 8086 back or were the benchmarks made with the V30? It would be cool to add V30 benchmarks to the video and have a 3 way comparison. I guess your intent was to show stock vs stock though... Great video!
You know whats sad? I had two of these. The first was actually bought by my father and we got a lot of use out of it. Coupled with a Juki 6100 daisy wheel printer with tractor feed, I was the only kid in grade school handing in typed homework! After it was retired, I took it apart to play with it and that was the end of it. Fast forward to when I was in high school and my friend moved into a new home which was previously owned by a network admin. He actually has the house wired with token ring! In a clost, in the basement he left behind a fully functioning and intact PC6300 which my friends parents gave to me. And again, I ruined that machine too by fiddling with it. Now I curse myself for having destroyed two functional 6300's. At least I now have two AT&T Unix PC's which I keep in good shape.
I have the 6300 monitor and computer practically brand new with original boxes and packing. Looks like it was used once and stored away. Make me an offer
Agreed about the long run; it was roughly 2x the speed of a PC so it could compete roughly until 1990, which is when I upgraded to a 386sx (which was like going from a car to a rocket, but still).
Microsoft Flight Simulator was more than a compatibility tester of sorts, it was THE compatibility tester. Clones makers would advertise such MS DOS compatibility.
From what you showed us the ATT 6300 was much faster and better than the IBM XT and was a good computer for the time. I like the way the monitor worked too, and I owned an IBM Aptiva which I still have with Windows 95 which came on it. I rebuilt an IBM PS/2 computer at work out of parts from other computers which was scrapped and given to the state by some company.
Great video! I'm inspired to make something similar for the Amstrad PC1512. I didn't realize how much the PC1512 had in common with the 6300 - clearly Amstrad copied some of the 6300's design features, in particular that machine's mouse also generates the same keyboard scancodes.
Running Windows 10, I would love a soft reset button that would me to reboot the system when I can't Ctl-Alt-Delete it. Bring back 1987. Now I just hard press power.
This computer was one of the "benefits"of the Bell System break-up AT&T could get a chance at the computer market if they broke up the Bell System and stopped using the bell logo.
I learned all the basics of MS-DOS and UNIX on that. The UNIX went away soon as Dad stuck to MS-DOS. I remember setting it up, making ANSI menus to run programs. the finer points of autoexec.bat and config.sys. that shit was fun. windows 1.0 was a mess and i didnt use it much other than showing off. windows 2.0 also...
I've got a funny feeling I've actually used the Olivetti PC this AT&T computer was based on, certainly I remember using an Olivetti PC in 1998 believe it or not and I remember there being what I thought was an RS-232 port on the back and only one cable for the monitor which was green. I don't think the computer had a PC-Speaker in it, if it did it didn't work on the one I used, I remember playing some really early DOS games on it and there wasn't any sound in any of them.
What model of mouse do you use in this video? I just recently acquired a PC 6300 from Goodwill and am in need of a mouse. I know the original AT&T or Olivetti branded mice are nigh on impossible to find, so hopefully I have better luck finding the Logitech one you have!
I'm afraid I don't have it in front of me at the moment, but I remember it being a Logitech "bus" mouse. Anything described as such, looking like the one in the video and having a 9-pin DIN, is the correct one. A "serial" mouse is not the same one.
Fun factoid, this video I retrieved as part of an archive of ftp.oldskool.org as "/pub/misc/A Look Back at the ATT PC 6300.ts" timestamp 2012-03-28T19:00 - glad I managed to track down attribution, and yes, that's a DVD master of some kind. (Alongside the classic MindCandy DVD.)
Also: I wish RUclips allowed moving videos between channels, keeping all of the comments and views, because this video really belongs on my vintage computing channel.
Exactly the same processor and speed, but the 6300 had a few extra enhancements that are demonstrated in the video (mouse, 400-line display and graphics mode, more built-in peripherals).
As far as I can tell, the AT&T has the slight edge over the Compaq for MHz. It's essentially the same relationship as the Amiga and ST; one is 7.16MHz (Amiga/Compaq) and the other is 8.0MHz (ST/AT&T), though there were maybe some other subtle differences like memory latency and ROM routine speed because contemporary magazine tests seemed to place them at almost exactly the same effective speed. (8MHz was the fastest the 8086-2 was rated for at first, and seems to be why the video card uses a punishing-for-1983 24MHz pixel clock, because Intel's first-party 8086/8088 clock generator divides the incoming crystal frequency by 3... in comparison 7.16 is half of the 14.32MHz colourburst crystal frequency - divide by 3 instead and you get 4.77 - which you are essentially forced to use for absolute IBM compatibility, and if you're using a "proper" CGA card, because that's the CGA pixel clock. Presumably Compaq used a different clock generator that divided by 2 instead...) ((and eventually the Olivetti-only M24SP which went up to 10MHz was pushing the limit of the fastest 8086 chip Intel ever made and put up a pretty good fight against the IBM AT in terms of speed... there was a 30MHz crystal in that, so I'm not quite sure how the original 24MHz-derived system timings were preserved...))
Awesome video, thanks! I'm just in the process of getting my M24 up and running again. It was the first PC I've ever had, and I destroyed the keyboard controller back in the early 90s. I'll try to fix it. My model has the emulator board instead of the single IC. I was thinking that maybe I could just replace it with a used Intel 8041a, but I'm unsure if there's custom ROM code on the chip.
Working for Lucent during that era, you can imagine what was on every developer's disk. The AT&T 6386 connected to an AT&T 3B2 600 via a 10Base2 NFS network.
Nice ! I'd like to have one .. It's not joke - ) - I collect retrocomputers... Also some my friend who has a museum and a big collection bought one not long ago - but HDD is dead (
The board shortage which was reported in the April 28, 1986 infoworld may have been a reason this computer did not survive. Sears business centers were actually accepting returns on these and selling them ATs. Any issue with the highly integrated board caused it to need replacement, and they could not make enough of them, I guess. in general. American computer maufacturers considered high amounts of board integration to be the hallmark of a cheaply made machine (re: PC Jr., Tandy 1000SX, and HX). While this was not true for European brands, I can see a computer salesman steering a consumer away from this machine for that reason.
Wow. I designed the graphics card. This video is a real trip down memory lane. I share a patent for the circuit that lets the card take low-level register programming of the graphics card, determine the software's desired format, and provide full compatibility at 400 lines instead. There was an add-on graphics expansion board I did that could plug in and get the system to 640x400 16 colors. I think only Olivetti sold it. The systems were also sold as the Xerox PC, and by Logabax.
+Herbert Kutscha Wow! That's cool!
That is really cool! I just finally got my hands on a DEB after 30 years; I look forward to trying it out, although there wasn't much software that took advantage of it, unfortunately.
For the DEB, the request was for "more graphics". They didn't really know what that should be. I added bit-planes and a color lookup table, resulting in 16 simultaneous colors. IBM compatible software didn't know about the bit-planes, so it didn't use them. It did have a cool feature, where two blink clocks went to the LUT as addresses, yielding four-phase blinking in up to four arbitrary colors.
I recall that the AT&T/Olivetti monitors did not use the same timing as the IBM monitors, and so in order to retain compatibility with software that would write to the CRT controller timing registers (MC6845 I believe) there was a address decode logic and ROM or PAL on the card that intercepted those particular writes and changed the data to the correct value.
Yeah, I've ended up reading up on that stuff pretty much by accident as I've been skimming the manuals for techie details about the output format (I've been trying to get details on old ~25khz monitor machines for a certain thought exercise and finding the details extremely hard to pin down). The system was officially called the "scrambler", and the explanation of how it works, and the formulae that it used to munge direct attempted-writes-to-CGA-registers by even the most badly behaved software into something that would still work on its own monitor went _wayyyy_ over my head. There's some pretty complex algebra in there. Extremely clever stuff.
I had a similar experience looking through the DEB programming guide, it was a bewilderingly capable piece of kit for an early 80s RGBI-compatible video board, including the multi-layer/multi-plane blending system and the interesting built-in multicolour dithering and flashing that gave you an easy way to work around the limitations of that colour system and draw images which simulated a higher colour depth. It's essentially the ultimate evolution of a CGA-type board... something of a pity both that it never really got the popularity or recognition it deserved (being overshadowed by the arguably not-really-any-better EGA), or that IBM didn't have the resources and technology to build something like that (or indeed the 8MHz 8086 and 16-bit expansion slots) right into the original PC.
(the next bit kinda warrants being a second post to make things more easily readable, if you'll indulge me)
What a completely classy hardware retrospective. Entertaining, informative, and of great quality. Loved it!
Yup
My first job as a lad at Olivetti in 1986 was re-aligning the floppy drives in those things. I remember all the techies running flight sim on it at lunchtime!
I used to have a PC 6300 - I was just thinking about it, and found this video. Imagine my surprise when I saw your machine - I'm the previous owner that modded that machine for the 3.5 inch floppy!
David Ifversen For real? Previous resident of Naperville?
Looks like he went off to "floppy" un"hard", cough disk cough. Ur voice is fake and robotic
I had one of these, passed down to me from my dad. I loved that machine! Too bad AT&T didn't continue making machines, because the 6300 was well built, and lasted me many, many years without repairs before it died. The only machine I ever cried over was that 6300, it was like I lost a close friend! I used to play LHX Attack Chopper, Overlord, M1 Abrams Tank Platoon, and Starflight 1 & 2
The quality of this video is way way way higher than most of anything on youtube, this might as well been a documentary or something. it was excellent.
love seeing GEOS the way it was meant with the high resolution screen. Very much still a usable interface in this modern day and age.
I ran it on an XT upgraded with the Hercules Card. Beautiful UI for its day.
Through the years I've bought, played with and resold many old PC's, but of all of them the AT&T 6300 is the one I've regularly kicked myself for not keeping. It was a fine machine. I used it for word processing and spreadsheets, which the 6300 handled quickly and efficiently. The high-res screen was easy on the eyes and the overall design was excellent. Thanks for this great retrospective.
I had the pleasure of servicing a few of these machines at the computer store I worked at back in 1999ish. There were quite a few in the area, not a surprise as the store was located in the same town as "the" Bell Labs. Yes, they were still in service, a testament of their build quality. We specialized in repairing legacy equipment where other stores would turn away customers. Not too many stores back then would touch anything earlier then a 486.
Man ... this is good stuff! This should have at least 1 million views
Because I wrote the script of what I was going to say before recording, the CC was easy to create; youtube allows you to upload text to increase accuracy. I'm glad it was worth it and helped you.
I owned this machine in ' 84 .. loved it! Thanks for this excellent video!
Pretty cool! I had an M24 that my father brought home, similar story! That opened a whole new world of computing with the whopping 10MB hard drive it had. I wish I'd kept it, I had fond memories of the quiet AC fan and blinking LEDs.
I now have an Olivetti ETV-260 word processor that I'm restoring. There sure is something about that Italian design that sure was quality.
I remember having one in high school in 1987 or so. I remember we had dual 5 1/4 floppies, 720k of memory and a 20mb or so hard card (if I recall correctly it didn't save things like a hard drive does so when the pc was turned off..you lost everything on it. I never saw another one and friends that came over couldn't believe how useful it was till I showed them) in it. I never actually saw a mouse for one till this video. I remember it would run circles around the IBM's at school. When I was programming games in basic at school and brought them home to work on, I had to slow them down to make them playable on the pc6300. Loved the video and thanks for bringing back some great memories.
As a teenager I got one of these at a thrift store for $15 complete EXCEPT for the keyboard. I ended up taking the hard drive and controller out and putting it in my leading edge model D. I always wished I had a keyboard to have been able to use the 6300. Great video!!
That was a great video, and what a wonderful trip down memory lane. I was with AT&T in the PC6300/3B2 era, and worked with many customers and trade shows. In fact on wroe one of the first TSR's for a screen saver, that was published in a book "The Fully Powered PC", for all IBM PC compatibles, circa 1980's. Well done video!
I found one used and loved it. Well built. It went away decades ago. I went crazy looking for the AT&T PC 6300 version of AutoCAD. I ran early AutoCAD on it but those versions did not exploit the superior graphics available and I didn't get a mouse with mine. That I would like to see/have running one day.
My video equipment may have misrepresented things, sorry. The AT&T 6300 did NOT produce more than 4 colors in 320x200 at a single time as it was a CGA clone and held to those rules. CGA had six different 320x200 palettes that changed the latter three colors, and the first color could be any of the 16 (but was typically black). Check MobyGames for King's Quest screenshots to see non-typical CGA palettes (as well as true 16-color 160x200 composite output).
One of the odd things about the graphics system, at least from everything I've read, is that if you add extra memory to it... you can get extra colours in both 640x400 and 640x200, but still not 320x200, and it still doesn't do anything such as automatically converting composite-colour graphics into a 160x200 mode with RGBI colours chosen to be close as possible to the artefact colours. Still, you can't have it all. I think the reason given was something to do with how the 640 modes were natively 1-bit monochrome, as a monolithic bitplane, and it was therefore easy to just add extra bitplanes in the piggybacked memory banks, whereas low-rez was a messy interleaved 2-bitplane setup that would have been a complete pain in the butt to try and extend (even on top of what they'd already done to build the full-colour 400-line modes) as you'd essentially have to duplicate that layout and simultaneously decode it to get 16 colours. Simpler to just use the memory as extra pages for the base mode, and if 320x200 16c was desired, just emulate it with doubled-up pixels in 640x200, a bit like using 320x200 256c to emulate low-rez EGA on an MCGA card.
Not sure what that might have meant for Plantronics/Tandy/PCjr or medium-rez EGA compatibility. Did anyone ever make a full-quality conversion of Thexder (which originated on a 640x200 3-bit RGB machine and so was one of the very few PC games, heck probably one of the few programs overall, to make use of 640x200 16c) for the expanded system, I wonder?
My first was the PC 6300 dual floppy with 640K Ram and an amber monochrome screen. Your description of the unboxing was almost exactly how it went for me. I was so disappointed to learn that when you turn it on, all you get is the A:\> command prompt and nothing more. I buckled down to learn Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar, file management, GWBASIC, and eventually Borland's Turbo Pascal. I also learned about making backup discs when I lost 2 years of data on automotive gas mileage. With a dot matrix printer and "sideways" printing software I felt invincible. I did the V30 upgrade and in those days it was huge since the microprocessor gained a lot of speed by prefetching the next command on the other side of the dual 16-bit bus. I also added the 8087 chip and that made a big difference in large Lotus 1-2-3 sheets. Finally, I was an AT&T employee at the time, and having an opportunity to read the schematics, learned the 2-megabyte memory expansion card was unnecessary since the mother board already was mapped for the next generation of memory chips. I simply bought a full set of memory ICs and flipped a few dip switches to get the full complement of expanded LIM Memory onboard.
Both my kids learned computing on this machine and became very adept. I never installed the 10 MB hard drive as newer computers were coming along that had much larger HDs for the same cost. The modern 100 MB HDs were an unbelievable size, and I could never imagine filling one up. Keep in mind, before modern media files came along, one byte was more or less equivalent to one keystroke. I once calculated 100 MB of non-stop typing 90 words per minute would take about 42 years.
As for games, I had the night mission pinball, flight simulator, and World Class Leader Board Golf. "Can't be too happy about that one Jim".
thanks for the blast from the past.
We shared very similar experiences!
Jim, this is awesome. I started working at BL in 1985 and my boss allowed me to take a 6300 to Georgia Tech as I completed my masters degree. Needless to say that I was like a King on campus with my own PC. This machine was awesome as you describe. Thank you so much for this excellent video and for the memories.
I grew up on this computer; thanks for not just the nostalgia, but insight into why my dad chose it!
That pc was surely in technical terms mega ahead of it's time.
Thank you for a great video which brought back lots of memories about an AT&T 6300, my first PC I owned in the USA. My computer was fast but a bit flaky. I have learned to take it apart and put it back as re-seating the motherboard, bus board, and controller cables fixed the problem for some reason. It was highly compatible with IBM XT/AT. I wrote programs for my research projects and they ran on IBM ATs without problem.
Mine was a bit flaky as well, but I believe that's because I abused it quite a lot. The 6300 I currently have in my collection (the one in the video) is extremely stable.
I am happy to see that. I worked all on those hardware and software since 1984 and alos R&D in Italy (Olivetti) . I have actully 3B400 in Unix .My best part of my live .
This doesn't seem like a video from 10 years ago. Such a high quality vid
That's very kind of you to say. It's on my list to redo someday, since the video was shot with a potato phone, and the music got removed by youtube for copyright. The remaster will go up on my @theoldskoolpc channel at some point.
My first computer was a PC 6300. My parents got it with 640KB of RAM, mono monitor, and two floppies (with the twist latches rather than the flip ones). We later got the ROM upgrade; a V30; a Hardcard, which died and was replaced with a hard drive installed in the second floppy bay (with some minor mods); some sort of "bus patch" board (iirc) and a jumper chip to disable the built-in display card (iirc) so we could install an Orchid ProDesigner II VGA card. I never knew what that 9 pin port on the keyboard was for until watching this video. We just got an ordinary Microsoft serial mouse. We also wound up replacing the keyboard with a clone, when the original died (iirc), which had function keys on both the top and the left side.
With the exception of your keyboard replacement, your experience was almost identical to our family's experience with the 6300. :-)
That's a super cool machine back in the day. Used to own one back in the early 90's and try to get another one but could not get my hands on a complete unit. I only manage to get a hold of a nice keyboard which end up in this video. True story.
Great descriptions of the 6300. Awesome job!! Alas, some of the novel proprietary features and strengths later became weaknesses. The "U-turn" design with the motherboard on the bottom and the expansion slots on top was convenient and compact, but added significant cost to the system when compared to other PC "clones" with much simpler chassis. The 6300 required three different circuit boards, four additional edge connectors, and additional intermediate sheet metal that all took their share in cutting into product margins. But perhaps the biggest early problem was the break with 16-bit PC-AT add-in card compatibility caused by the 6300 having its 16-bit extension located away from the 8-bit ISA connector and therefore 'standard' 16-bit add-in cards could not be used. Performance advantages were good, but short lived, as by 1985 PC and PC-AT clones with 8 MHz "turbo" modes were widely available. (with the 4.77 MHz speed option retained for compatibility).
As noted, the 1.43 BIOS was required to support add-in video adapters. Using a 3rd party video adapter also required removing a chip from the 6300's built-in video adapter. Since the adapter shared with the U-turn function, it could not be readily removed to create 'video-less' skus for people who wanted to use 3rd party adapters. The video adapter thus became another 'cost overhead'. I recall The 1.43 BIOS also corrected a little 'eccentricity' with the system tick. The hardware used a different frequency for the UART clock (which was subsequently divided to create the interrupt that ultimately became the system 'tick') and the BIOS didn't configure the system to account for the difference, causing about 20 minutes per day of system-ticks to be 'lost'. Even though the 6300 included its own RTC, once MS-DOS got the time-of-day it relied on the system tick and people wondered why they were losing time when they left them running.
The 16-bit connector, U-turn, and video adapters carried through to the follow-on '286-based 6300 Plus with its revolutionary 'Simultask' logic. But that additional logic was yet another overhead on those looking for just a faster AT clone from a major U.S. company.
The quality of the double-scanned CGA and the crisp text display were big sellers and made the 6300 a major player for a while, but the design aspects that added cost, broke compatibility with the IBM PCs, and required proprietary cards and peripherals ultimately took their toll. (E.g. was having lights on the keyboard worth the cost of having a proprietary connection?) The lesson learned during those years was that you could differentiate by going beyond the IBM PC's capabilities, but not at the cost of compatibility and the ability to leverage the ecosystem of 3rd party vendors who were building for the PC. But it wasn't just a mistake made by Olivetti/AT&T. Companies such as Digital Equipment also tried to go the 'proprietary peripherals' route and paid for it. By the time that AT&T/Olivetti moved to making computers that had full compatibility, they had lost the opportunity to lead by being a proper (but full compatible) feature superset of the IBM offerings. Instead, that opportunity was taken by Compaq and their dedication to providing enhancements while preserving interoperability and compatibility with the PC.
Interesting video. I actually supervised an AT&T facility that repaired these PCs near Chicago in 1986. They repaired them like they did the phones next door. Rip the whole PC apart and refurbish the parts, then reassemble the now scrambled parts. You never knew what the original problem was, so you never were really sure of the repair. I didn't stay there very long.
The M20 is a good example of how market success can be a subjective thing depending on your location and occupation. It seems to have done poorly on a global basis, and I hadn't heard it before last week, but apparently it found a place on the desk of every tax accountant in Italy because of being one of the first systems to get a decent desktop accounting software package... to the point where they even gained a wake-on-ring remote power device that could start the computer in your office late at night when a central mainframe (possibly the Italian IRS? I forget, it was a bit of a skim) dialled in to send data back and forth. Not sure if it even had any popularity outside of Italy even in the rest of southern Europe, but there does seem to be at least still some enthusiasm for it, and for emulating the system. And of course, the M24 had an emulator card for the M20 available, with a custom video mode for that card built right in to the main video system...
I still have my much loved 6300. We obtained the side caddy with the 10 meg Hard drive (later hacked in a winchester 40) and replaced one of the 5 1/4 floppies with a 3.5 720. The last additiin was a Sota board that made it a quasi 286. One note about the screens, there was a third option of an amber monochrome version. Love the vid, cheers!
I have never seen the amber screen, would love to find one someday.
Jim Leonard They were pretty unusual even back in the 80's - The M20 had them quite often though.
Very interesting look at this old computer. I am always fascinated with older computers their history and how they work.
My dad also worked for AT&T and got us (him) a 6300 plus 286. I don't know the year. I think 83 or 84. had the small green screed originally. He upgraded it with an HDD I don;t know what size and a 1.2M FDD. When he upgraded that was my first computer in 7 or 88 or so. by then it had a 20MB HDD, 1024k extended ram, 1.2m fdd and a vga card and an NEC multisync monitor. I had the 84 key keyboard (with no number pad) and the mouse that plugged into the top of the keyboard. He also could get those membrane clear dust covers for the keyboard. Had an old external high speed modem. I remember playing sticky bear, kings quest, lemmings, and lode runner on it. External modem, back when you had to dial up an actual bbs board, not the general internet. Good times.
I just bought a 6300 plus cpu4 barebones case off ebay, i'm gonna build a modern PC in it. Good times!
Really enjoyed this. Comes across as very top-end. You should have way more views.
This is a really well put together video.
Thanks. I wish I had time to put together more videos; I'd love to do a similarly in-depth look at the IBM PCjr, but I'm involved with other projects right now.
Wow that device was ahead of its time
We had one of these when I was in high school. We installed a 386sx daughter board in one of the slots and two 40 mb hard drives, one RLL and the other MFM. Brings back memories.
Superb production, great subject material and great music selection. Enjoyed every minute, thank you!
Excellent video Jim and very professionally made!Lots of info I didn't know about the AT&T PC 6300
Astoundingly well-produced video! I saw a post of this video on the "Armchair Arcade" website, but admit that I had very little interest in the subject matter, since I was not enamored with the "MS-DOS" clones of that period.
However, your detailed highlights of the superb engineering and capabilities of this machine kept me entranced throughout the duration of the video! I don't think anyone could possibly ask for a more informative and entertaining video on the AT&T 6300. Exceptional job!!!
Yeah, good memories. We had the Olivetti M24 and the identical (except for the color) Logabax 1600 at the University in Metz/France from 1985 up to 1990 (when I graduated, after that I don't know). We had it to learn programming in Turbo Pascal 3 and the funny thing is that I found a patch in a German magazine that replaced the 640x200 by the 640x400 mode. This gave me an edge over my colleagues for the graphical assignments we had (a chess board and CAD toolbox). I had also the luck to own an Atari Mega ST2 in which I had installed the PC-Speed emulator which allowed me to program for the M24 as the emulator supported the Olivetti mode and ran with a NEC V30 at 8MHz, so quite close to the real thing (a little bit faster as the V30 was closer to a 80186 than a 8086).
From TP 4.0 and later, they finally included an actual AT&T 6300 640x400 BGI driver, so that's how I ended up using that mode. These days, I look at the specs and see that it was possible to have 320x200x4 in two true video pages, and now I wonder if any game ever used that...
We had a AT&T 6300, It had 1 360k and 1 20mb hd. I recall it only having CGA, or at least in games like Sierra. I think Hercules MGA worked also. It was our 1st computer complete with the AT&T monitor. I wish I kept it now
This video was very well done and I found it very interesting.
My father also bought one in 1985. The model he bought had a 10MB C: hard drive and a 5 1/4" A: floppy as represented in your later model version, but no 3 1/2" floppy B: (I assume that came out later)... It was maxed out with 640KB RAM and sold bundled with an Okidata Microline dot matrix printer for the low price of $1999.99.
That vertical floppy disk drive is hilarious
So janky. I have since obtained better specimens where someone didn't cut into the metal.
Never mind... Saw where you addressed the 3 1/2" floppy!
It definitely was a great computer. We upgraded to a 40MB HD card and a 2400 baud internal modem in 1989... Eventually in 1991, it was time to upgrade, and we went with a cheap clone (as was common at the time) that could support newer upgrades. But, this machine definitely had a good run - especially for its time, when everything was changing so quickly.
Heh. I actually used a Programa 101 in high school. It was marketed as the Olivetti-Underwood Programa 101. I also use the PC 6300 while working at AT&T Network Systems in the 80's. It was a pretty good computer at the time.
I used a model M24 countless times in the mid-80's. It was a nice machine, and I liked it very much. Today I only have one pre-486 machine. A complete original Unisys Ps/2 series 300. Yup... Original down to the manual and BIOS software. Even have the original 1987 optical 3-button sperry mouse.
love the old ads!
The keyboard was an Olivetti keyboard. At the time there were two schools of keyboard buff. Those who liked the rather "clicky" IBM typewriter keyboards and those who liked Olivetti's take that was softer. Professional typists generally preferred the keyboard they'd learned on. So the comment about the keyboard here is invidious.
In Europe, Olivetti offered three monochrome monitors with green, white and orange phosphors.
The serial port could be upgraded with a chip (an 8250 iirc) on the motherboard to allow synchronous communications. As far as I recall, this was only used for a few turnkey projects Olivetti did for large Italian customers such as Autostrade Srl.
One problem of having two identical ports on the back was the (slightly) famous blown blue gun on the colour displays caused by people plugging them into the parallel port.
My first keyboard was the Olivetti keyboard which I used for five years. Later keyboards were clones. After that, I typed on an IBM buckling-spring keyboard and found it was the very best for me to type on, so for the last 20 years I've standardized on IBM "model-m" keyboards.
I did not overlook the fact that the top and bottom came off the case, as there are several pictures of both in the video. I'm guessing you didn't finish the video, or only skimmed it.
Jim, you're quite right in your observation in my comment. You read an early draft of it. I later amended it.
Wonderful video. Congratulations, you did an excellent work.
In 1987, I was hired by a company that also gave me my first use of the PC (although I had a Commodore 64 at home). They gave me the AT&T 6300. I fell in love with it, and became pretty good with the 123 spreadsheet and WordPerfect 5.1 software. I've got a little museum of some of those early PCs on my channel. Still looking for one of those AT&T 6300s to add into it. Computers in the 80s, really cool huh? Ah, those old DOS days!! Great video, and thats for making it! -- Atco
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║ God i miss the golden computing old times where gui's, actual ones, were made of characters like these
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The technical reference manual is available at seasip dot info. Appendix 1 says "In Text Mode, mouse movement will cause cursor key tokens to be inserted into the keyboard buffer." and section 2.3.3 describes how the mouse buttons generate keycodes. I remember you could use the NVR program to set the key codes generated by the mouse buttons. I seem to recall that enter and escape were the defaults but maybe I'm confusing it with the enter and forward-delete codes - section 2.4 says otherwise.
"Made in Italy"
One time, we were a good country but now.....
...Jeremy Clarkson is Italian?
Awesome video Jim.
one of my college classes was still using m24's in 1992! I still have an M28 286 that I fire up now and then.
I agree with the other comments... this review is just oozing with quality. Mr. Jim Leonard, know that your effort is being appreciated :)
Due to get a 6300 soon - i'm stoked! Only real gotcha i've heard is that if the clock battery ruptures the whole board tends to go with it if any leakage at all hits the board.
That's true of all motherboards. At least with the 6300, if the battery explodes while the system is stored normally (upright), it just drips down onto the case.
ah! good to know.
So, my 6300 has arrived and only wants to boot to a 0 with a blinking underscore. I hate to bother you about this more, but you happen to know anything about that? The service manual i'm consulting doesn't say too much on the matter and i suspect either the memory is faulty or the DIP switches have been tampered with.
That is a catastrophic failure. You aren't even getting to the POST. Examine the motherboard for bad caps and exploded battery damage. Try rearranging the ram.
yeah, I think RAM issues may be the culprit. nothing obviously broken and the RTC is intact. three chips aren't of the same manufacture as the rest; could that cause issues? would improper DIPs cause a outright failure to post?
Wow... this takes me back. Nice video!
I came here thanks to phreakindee / lazygamereviews.
Very good review and I also like the music when you compare the AT&T PC 6300 with an IBM PC/XT.
Very interesting video. Even though I was mostly using Atari and Commodore computers through the eighties, I have a wide spreed interest of all computers from this decade. Being hearing impaired, I also appreciate the subtitle (cc) option for this video. Thanks.
Wow. Thanks for the memories! Been a while since I had one of these. I was watching an episode of "MacGyver" that had a ton of them in it, so it prompted me to go look around and see what I could dig up on them ;)
Bolling Holt Neat, which episode was it?
I've seen them pop up in several episodes, but this particular one is in season two, "Phoenix Under Siege". MacGyver also has one at his house I believe.
I'm not at all surprised that flipped motherboards didn't catch on. Before SMT, motherboards were wave-soldered: the board passes over a wave of molten solder which adheres to all the pins of the components. Installing the card edge connectors on the reverse of the board would require them to be manually soldered onto the motherboard, and PC motherboards being dirt cheap, that would of taken an unacceptable cut into the manufacturer's margin. There is an altogether better model anyway: passive AT backplanes with the CPU and memory on a riser, but that didn't catch on except in industrial PCs, again because it was more expensive. Today PXI and VXS are superior form-factors to PCIe but for the same reason nobody is going out and building their desktop computers with it because of the added expense. I actually thought about doing it, but when I got quotes for buying a VXS backplane and compute board for an old VME chassis, I piked out because it was too expensive.
Thanks for the info! I'd add that passive AT backplanes with risers were also less desirable for consumers because they required more case real-estate.
The whole concern behind the design was allowing full access to the motherboard. 'Tis nice, and we didn't get into trouble with signal quality, though the main power distribution needed to be manly. It is a bit tall and heavy though. It did make it feel expensive, and it was a major investment for most folks.
It was a completely separate board under the machine. No issues as you describe.
I feel compelled to correct your claim at 6m44s. IBM released the AT 84-key keyboard in 1984 (not 1985!) -- a Model F (NOT Model M!) that had programmable LEDs for the CAPSLOCK, NUMLOCK, and SCROLLOCK keys. Kinda obscure, but factual nonetheless.
Thanks for the correction. I plan on revisiting the 6300 with a new video at a future date, and I'll be sure to have correct Model F information. I still feel compelled to point out that the M24 was designed with keyboard lights in '83, before the Model F 6450200 with LEDs was released.
You're welcome.
Touché, sir. ;)
Excellent video. Well done. Thank you.
My First Computer :D - Family purchased it in 87/88 from a company that went out of business.
Hi Jim,
for the benchmarks did you install an 8086 back or were the benchmarks made with the V30? It would be cool to add V30 benchmarks to the video and have a 3 way comparison. I guess your intent was to show stock vs stock though...
Great video!
+Carlos Teixeira The video shows the actual CPUs used. Benchmarks were not with an NEC V30. V30 provides, overall, about 20% more performance.
You know whats sad? I had two of these. The first was actually bought by my father and we got a lot of use out of it. Coupled with a Juki 6100 daisy wheel printer with tractor feed, I was the only kid in grade school handing in typed homework! After it was retired, I took it apart to play with it and that was the end of it. Fast forward to when I was in high school and my friend moved into a new home which was previously owned by a network admin. He actually has the house wired with token ring! In a clost, in the basement he left behind a fully functioning and intact PC6300 which my friends parents gave to me. And again, I ruined that machine too by fiddling with it. Now I curse myself for having destroyed two functional 6300's. At least I now have two AT&T Unix PC's which I keep in good shape.
I have the 6300 monitor and computer practically brand new with original boxes and packing. Looks like it was used once and stored away. Make me an offer
Agreed about the long run; it was roughly 2x the speed of a PC so it could compete roughly until 1990, which is when I upgraded to a 386sx (which was like going from a car to a rocket, but still).
wow i m a retroprogrammer with basic. this is fantastic
LOVE THE STORY!!! hope you get more views
The PC1512 was a couple of years later than the 6300 though, so I think you're still technically correct.
very informative video. Great work!
For Microsoft operating systems, the reset bottom is extremely important and convenient, even today.
I am currently exploring the vortex386sx in my megaSTE and this also supports 640x400 as olivetti mode.
very nice video thank you
Microsoft Flight Simulator was more than a compatibility tester of sorts, it was THE compatibility tester. Clones makers would advertise such MS DOS compatibility.
From what you showed us the ATT 6300 was much faster and better than the IBM XT and was a good computer for the time. I like the way the monitor worked too, and I owned an IBM Aptiva which I still have with Windows 95 which came on it. I rebuilt an IBM PS/2 computer at work out of parts from other computers which was scrapped and given to the state by some company.
Great video! I'm inspired to make something similar for the Amstrad PC1512. I didn't realize how much the PC1512 had in common with the 6300 - clearly Amstrad copied some of the 6300's design features, in particular that machine's mouse also generates the same keyboard scancodes.
Running Windows 10, I would love a soft reset button that would me to reboot the system when I can't Ctl-Alt-Delete it. Bring back 1987. Now I just hard press power.
This computer was one of the "benefits"of the Bell System break-up AT&T could get a chance at the computer market if they broke up the Bell System and stopped using the bell logo.
I learned all the basics of MS-DOS and UNIX on that. The UNIX went away soon as Dad stuck to MS-DOS. I remember setting it up, making ANSI menus to run programs. the finer points of autoexec.bat and config.sys. that shit was fun. windows 1.0 was a mess and i didnt use it much other than showing off. windows 2.0 also...
in the range from 80286, olliveti made beautifull desktop casings
I've got a funny feeling I've actually used the Olivetti PC this AT&T computer was based on, certainly I remember using an Olivetti PC in 1998 believe it or not and I remember there being what I thought was an RS-232 port on the back and only one cable for the monitor which was green. I don't think the computer had a PC-Speaker in it, if it did it didn't work on the one I used, I remember playing some really early DOS games on it and there wasn't any sound in any of them.
Nope, our original 6300 gave up the ghost around 1993. The unit in the video is one I purchased at a garage sale in 2001 for $15.
That's really cool.
Great video, very detailed !
Great video.
What model of mouse do you use in this video? I just recently acquired a PC 6300 from Goodwill and am in need of a mouse. I know the original AT&T or Olivetti branded mice are nigh on impossible to find, so hopefully I have better luck finding the Logitech one you have!
I'm afraid I don't have it in front of me at the moment, but I remember it being a Logitech "bus" mouse. Anything described as such, looking like the one in the video and having a 9-pin DIN, is the correct one. A "serial" mouse is not the same one.
Fun factoid, this video I retrieved as part of an archive of ftp.oldskool.org as "/pub/misc/A Look Back at the ATT PC 6300.ts" timestamp 2012-03-28T19:00 - glad I managed to track down attribution, and yes, that's a DVD master of some kind. (Alongside the classic MindCandy DVD.)
That specific file is actually a Blu-ray-mastered file :-)
Also: I wish RUclips allowed moving videos between channels, keeping all of the comments and views, because this video really belongs on my vintage computing channel.
Aah, the days when a manual was more than an online 2 page pdf
....So it's the equivalent of the original Compaq Deskpro, also an 8Mz 8086, yes?
Exactly the same processor and speed, but the 6300 had a few extra enhancements that are demonstrated in the video (mouse, 400-line display and graphics mode, more built-in peripherals).
Compaq got to 400 lines at almost the same time, but my bass and I got the patent for the circuit that made it register-level compatible.
As far as I can tell, the AT&T has the slight edge over the Compaq for MHz. It's essentially the same relationship as the Amiga and ST; one is 7.16MHz (Amiga/Compaq) and the other is 8.0MHz (ST/AT&T), though there were maybe some other subtle differences like memory latency and ROM routine speed because contemporary magazine tests seemed to place them at almost exactly the same effective speed.
(8MHz was the fastest the 8086-2 was rated for at first, and seems to be why the video card uses a punishing-for-1983 24MHz pixel clock, because Intel's first-party 8086/8088 clock generator divides the incoming crystal frequency by 3... in comparison 7.16 is half of the 14.32MHz colourburst crystal frequency - divide by 3 instead and you get 4.77 - which you are essentially forced to use for absolute IBM compatibility, and if you're using a "proper" CGA card, because that's the CGA pixel clock. Presumably Compaq used a different clock generator that divided by 2 instead...)
((and eventually the Olivetti-only M24SP which went up to 10MHz was pushing the limit of the fastest 8086 chip Intel ever made and put up a pretty good fight against the IBM AT in terms of speed... there was a 30MHz crystal in that, so I'm not quite sure how the original 24MHz-derived system timings were preserved...))
Awesome video, thanks!
I'm just in the process of getting my M24 up and running again. It was the first PC I've ever had, and I destroyed the keyboard controller back in the early 90s. I'll try to fix it. My model has the emulator board instead of the single IC. I was thinking that maybe I could just replace it with a used Intel 8041a, but I'm unsure if there's custom ROM code on the chip.
Working for Lucent during that era, you can imagine what was on every developer's disk. The AT&T 6386 connected to an AT&T 3B2 600 via a 10Base2 NFS network.
Gah! NiCad battery still installed? thats a deathwish.
You're right! I should probably remove it.
Nice ! I'd like to have one .. It's not joke - ) - I collect retrocomputers... Also some my friend who has a museum and a big collection bought one not long ago - but HDD is dead (
The board shortage which was reported in the April 28, 1986 infoworld may have been a reason this computer did not survive. Sears business centers were actually accepting returns on these and selling them ATs. Any issue with the highly integrated board caused it to need replacement, and they could not make enough of them, I guess.
in general. American computer maufacturers considered high amounts of board integration to be the hallmark of a cheaply made machine (re: PC Jr., Tandy 1000SX, and HX). While this was not true for European brands, I can see a computer salesman steering a consumer away from this machine for that reason.
Great video!
Wow whats funky electronica at the end?
check the end credits at 19:15 -- "Riveted" by Virt.
Unfortunately, unless I'm mistaken, it's not on his BandCamp page virt.bandcamp.com
Correct; he gave it to me personally a long time ago.