Ever seen one of these?

I had a classmate that used to bring his to class every night. Just slung his satchel w/the keyboard over his shoulder and carried this in his arms up the elevator and down the hall to class.

It's a Pronto Series 16, running at a blazing fast 8Mhz, and that's a 5.6 MByte removable hard disk there too. Pronto Computers was located in Torrance (my hometown) just down the street from Epson and Ashton Tate (dBase II, III)

Heck I can't even remember the guy's name, but he worked in some local aerospace company and fancied himself an ubergeek; if this box is any indication he sure was, lolz.

So what's so special about this machine? Well, if you ask any 50 people about an IBM compatible computer that ran on an intel 80186 CPU they'll prolly all tell you there was never any such beast - but there was, and this was it (I recall it was fast as fuck, so they prolly pioneered manufacturing production machines that were ahead of their time, while IBM and the clone manufacturers decided to skip a generation and take their time working on a platform that leveraged the 80286.).

The hard disk was light years ahead of its time too - portable Zip Drives (100MBytes) didn't appear on the scene for another ten years, but this was an actual miniature hot swappable Syquest HDD spinning at I believe, the standard of 3600 RPMs.... I can't be sure though, but it was nice listening to that quiet buzz saw sound just singing along.

We were in a Pascal class together, so he would show up, insert a disk, boot to UCSD P-System and off he would go. The rest of us would too, but we had those noisy 5&1/4" floppy disks that made all those cute noises in our IBM 5150 PCs (4.77MHz 8080 CPUs), lolz.... Well, we did have a few XT's w/HDDs, some VT-52 like terminals for the PDP-11, and some 3270 terminals too connected to a mainframe at the main campus in Sandy Eggo.

His #Pronto was a screamer for sure, and I'd only ever seen an amberchrome monitor for mini computers at work, which were much larger. The graphics (Yah, we actually called them graphics at the time) were superior to what we could do w/o an expensive #Princeton_Graphics #CGA card and matching .51mm dot pitch color monitor too.

I had lots of minis, super-minis, and a few mainframes at work, but in the personal computer world there was literally nothing that could perform like this 8MHz 186... nothing. It was a screamer!

But alas, after him spending close to five grand, the IBM 3270 PC/AT was soon to be released, relegating that guys 186 hot rod to the annals of forgotten songs and unsung heroes. The new #AT_Class machines kinda trickled in though, so if you wanted one of those you got to the computer lab early. They also supported HD Floppies w/1.2MB storage - a vast improvement over that of the earlier, so-called Double Density 360KB floppies, although there were some issues moving data between those two formats that required a few tricks - like loading an earlier command.com (kinda like sourcing another shell once you ssh into a box)... Okay I'm rambling.

I kinda liked that guy, and kinda didn't. Most of the other students didn't care for him too much. He was arrogant and one of those, "Mine's better than yours" sort of person, but he was competent, friendly with me, generally speaking, for a guy who was wound real tight, and I could tell he didn't get any pussy, so I kinda felt sorry for him too.

I should mention that there technically were a couple of other manufacturers out there during that era shipping 80186 computers, but I've never seen any of them and don't know anything about them.

Well, that's about it for that era, I just thought that I'd share that little bit of computer history with everyone. I hope you enjoyed reading about this truly innovative machine and it's brief time on the market.

#tallship #IBM #Pronto_Computer #retrocomputing @SDF :)

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