DEC RAINBOW

I picked this beauty up in a swap meet almost 20 years ago and put it in a box where it has been stored until this last week's clean out of one of my storage rooms. I have quite a few different older systems and hope to someday make a small exhibit of all the fun ones, but the storage area is overflowing with other more practical things and some of my collection needed to be thinned out.

The Rainbow is a wonder example of early computers and was a remarkable unit. It has 2 processors and could run its own version of DOS (using an intel 8088 processor) and also the CPM operating system (using the Zilog Z80 CPU). This one is in excellent shape as you can see from the pictures. It has been carefully stored in a somewhat controlled environment and is like new inside.

It has the remarkable dual floppy drives - two of them to give a total of 4 disks online at one time. It has the built in memory and an add-on memory card with what it (to the best of my knowledge) 192k ram total - a hefty amount for a Rainbow. I have powered it up and it comes on, no smoke, and appears to be ok - but I have no monitor or keyboard rigged up to plug into its connections for a more full test, nor any OS disks at present.

If you have a Rainbow system this would be a good addition and spare for it, or you might hunt down the disk images and connection information to get it running fully yourself. I have seen several sources for both on the net. There is an excellent FAQ for this system also available.

I have done a close visual inspection of the system and see no corrosion or indications of leaking capacitors - and expect it to be working properly when it has a boot disk and monitor - but as there is no easy way for me to test it fully I am not offering any guarantee that it will work fully and can only say that my description is accurate. Please give this remarkable and rare little computer a good home.

PLEASE NOTE:
Most of these pictures are bigger than displayed - so will suffer quality in most browsers the way I put them on this page - If you wish to view a better quality picture just do a right click on the picture you wish to see and save it to a folder or your desktop. Then you can open with your usual picture viewing / editing software to get the best full size view.

System board - slides out a slot in the back for easy service. The long circuit board to the right is the drive controller circuit board which plugs on top of the system board.

The memory expansion board with 18 64k chips to give the system an additional 128k of ram. As I understand the system board has 64k, this should bring the system total to 192k - a quite healthy amount for early systems.

The power supply for the Rainbow is modular and has a circuit breaker button near the standard power connector.

A real piece of personal computing history
- The Digital Rainbow Personal Computer -

a few of many interesting links on the
details and history of this series of computers