The PCS 80 came with a lot of peripherals: line and character printers, CRT terminals, intelligent keyboards, ACR storage, 8" and 5.25" floppy disks and with several languages: TTY BASIC with OS, 4K, 8K and 12K BASIC, audio cassette BASIC with OS, & a scientifically oriented disk BASIC and level 2 Fortran IV compiler.
Greg Bober stil have an extended working configuration including:
• External 5.25" quad density 380Kb Micropolis floppy with BASIC,
• Faster memory & "I" tempgrade CPU, speed could goto 7MHz,
• 58K 10MHz RAM,
• Custom boot operating system,
• 64K of extended RAM/ported PROM containing the DOS & BASIC operating
system to have 1 second versus 30 second floppy boot up,
• Extrernal 12" monitor since 24x80 is hard to see on tiny screen,
• Spare parts.
Numerous photos of his system may be seen here.
Please consider donating your old computer / videogame system to Old-Computers.com or one of our partners from anywhere in the world (Europe, America, Asia, etc.).
IIRC: A heavily modified PCS-80 was used by Rob Barnaby to develop WordStar. Modifications (as I can best tell) included an inverse video board ("Black on White" instead of the regular "While on Black") and 5.25 Inch dual floppy disks with an external monitor. Currently located at DigiBarn, it no longer has the inverse video board. I could be mistaken, but this looks like the very same model.
Tuesday 31st December 2019
Lawrence Shadai (United States)
yes, they used an IMSAI in war games but not this one, they use the 8080
Wednesday 6th April 2005
j4kc (a)
Did they use this kind of computer in War Games ? Would like to know because I saw a IMSAI floppy system. Thanks,Matt
Tuesday 21st December 2004
Matt (Earth)
NAME
PCS 80
MANUFACTURER
IMSAI
TYPE
Professional Computer
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
1977
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
None
KEYBOARD
Video terminal
CPU
Intel 8080 - IMSAI PCS 80/30 came with
SPEED
3 MHz
RAM
2.25 KB (up to 64 KB thanks to RAM boards, there are 4K, 16K, 32K and 64K memory expansion boards).
ROM
3 KB (Including monitor)
TEXT MODES
12x40, 12x80, 24x40 and 24x80 (128 characters of either 5x7 or 7x10 dot matirx fonts)
I/O PORTS
Serial ports (2) - Parallel Port (1) - Monitor - S100 Bus (8 expansion slots)
OS
8K DOS based upon CP/M
POWER SUPPLY
built-in 28AMP power supply unit
PERIPHERALS
Floppy drives inteface, Single or dual 8'' drives in a separate housing same size as main frame unit
