Older Radio Shack catalogs online

[Pete, WA2CWA]

I moved to and spent about a year with ComputerLand during the early days of the PC boom while getting an MBA.  This was an interesting time to work with PC's as so many things didn't work quite right or were not quite as IBM PC compatible as advertised.  It was fairly stressful trying to keep a few large customers happy (like a architecture firm that purchased 150 AT&T 6300+ PC's to run Autocad).  The PC's were delivered in 3 groups of 50 over a 3 month period and each group was slightly different than the others.  After Cland, going into a Ph.D. program at a high pressure research universtiy was actually less stressful; something a number of my fellow Ph.D. candidates had trouble understanding.

Rodger WQ9E

I "fondly" remember the PC 6300 and 6300+ with their non-documented hardware changes, but they were much faster then the IBM XT at the time. I was working in the AT&T PC Product Management Division doing inventory management as these things arrived from Italy. Of course, the real hair puller was the infamous PC-7300 machine. The lights didn't come on at AT&T and Olivetti for a robust design until the PC-6312. I still have several 386, PC-6386's, floating around here. If you need any 6300 or 6300+ power supplies, I think I still have some. And, I believe, I still have service manuals for all those early AT&T machines.

[WQ9E]

Pete,

For quite a while I had my then new Yaesu FT-980 CAT (Computer Aided Transceiver) hooked up to a 6300 and the computer was pretty radio quiet, unfortunately the Yaesu synthesizer wasn't!  Yaesu did have a simple basic program allowing the PC to exercise some rudimentary control over the radio.  In my opinion the AT&T keyboard had a much nicer feel than IBM and it was definitely a more responsive PC.  I installed a couple small 7300 systems so I had a self taught crash course in Unix.  I recall the 6300 and 6300+ systems were very trouble free unlike the IBM PC-AT's with their suicidal hard drives.

There were some amusing IBM issues in that time frame. The PC junior with its infrared keyboard was heavily promoted to the school market; it didn't take school kids long to learn that they could aim their keyboard at another students machine and write dirty words of their choice to other unsuspecting kids.  The quiet writer printer was a daisy wheel letter quality printer that used heat and a plastic ribbon to transfer beautiful looking print to a page.  The first warning issued was not to use the quiet writer printer to print checks because a quiet writer typewriter could then be used to change the check payee and/or amount since it could use heat to remove the existing characters and substitute new ones.  The big issue came after a couple of years when it turned out that the letters didn't stick very long to most paper stock.  I recall seeing a photo showing a file drawer full of little plastic letters lying in the bottom while mostly blank sheets of paper were in the hanging folders-the files in question were in an attorney's office so I doubt if that was a happy outcome for big blue!

I just tossed out the instruction books and MS-DOS disks/books from my 6300 a few years ago.  My 6300 fell victim to a lightning surge many years ago.  For its time I think it was the most attractive of the PC systems with a nice aesthetic and mechanical design.  As I recall Olivetti won numerous awards for their typewriter designs in Europe so the company definitely had a great design team.  AT&T was in such turmoil by that time that their PC's didn't have a real chance.  The AT&T rep I dealt with was "downsized" from the long lines group and he was a pleasant alcoholic who was quite computer illiterate.

Rodger WQ9E

[Pete, WA2CWA]

Being at AT&T Computer Systems at that time allowed me to play with many variations of the 6300 and its followers. There was a constant flow of ancillary and enhancement type boards being submitted by outside designers to be certified as compatible with the 6300 family. Then there was the family of dot matrix printers, color plotter (HP rebranded), the color dot matrix printer, and a number of monitors to be compatible with weird graphics card we used in those models. Somewhere around here I still have a host of product brochures of all those PC's and accessories we managed back then. The Olivetti equivalent 6300 PC was their M24. It was a sharp design. The basic model included a 10 Meg hard drive and, if desired, an optional 20 Meg drive. We dropped the 10 Meg early on and made the 20 Meg standard.

There were three keyboards available for the 6300 and 6300+. Two had 102-type keys, similar to what we use today. The third had only 84 keys and had the clank sound with each key pressing. The feel was to mimic the IBM keyboards  and the old TWX type 4540 keyboards. The picture in my previous post shows the 84 key keyboard.

I remember those quiet write printers. I believe our color printer was patterned after its daisy wheel design. I still have around here a IBM service memorandum that was distributed to all service people in the field that was entitled "The Care And Cleaning of Mouse Balls". I assumed it was meant to be serious, but almost anyone who read it was rolling on the floor by the time they got to the end of the memorandum.

My favorite AT&T PC during those early years was the 286 machine, PC-6312. With this one, any off-the-shelf IBM-compatible memory, graphics, or whatever card would generally work fine in this machine.

[WB2YGF]

I have a couple of 6286 WGS's in my basement.  Have not got around to chucking them.

I think the only antique I will keep is the Eagle PC 2, one of the first true BIOS compatible clones.  Came with both MS DOS and CPM/86 OS's.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=529

[Opcom]

Just found my copy of the last rat chachk catalog. The one with the loose woman, neon in hand, on the cover. Gave it to my apprentice.

[Pete, WA2CWA]

I have a couple of 6286 WGS's in my basement.  Have not got around to chucking them.

I think the only antique I will keep is the Eagle PC 2, one of the first true BIOS compatible clones.  Came with both MS DOS and CPM/86 OS's.

A number of the "WGS" models were actually designed at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ