Televideo brand early PC

This Web page last updated dated May 23 2012

This is an initial Web page to describe this old Televideo PC I "dug" up - it's almost that dirty. But it seems to have some life left! To contact me and for general ordering information follow this link.

I bought an old OLD "luggable PC" at the Vintage Computer Fest - East 8.0 in early May 2012. Frankly, I bought it for the floppy drives. I decided at the time they were likely 35/40 track 360K floppy drives. It was cheap enough. A few weeks later I opened it up and checked it out.

As you can see by the brandname badge, it's a Televideo model of some sort. But it has another badge, my guess is from the US Marine Corps (USMC) The USMC badge simply says "PLANT ACCOUNT USMC". The brand badge says "TeleVideo Systems Inc TVIXL" and a serial number.

Inside is an XT motherboard. Here's a photo of part of the board. It's branded "Federal Data Corp XL PCA0001". Looks like a semi-clone or semi-compatible IBM PC design, with the usual 8088 and other chips; 256K bytes of RAM plus sockets for another 256K. The monitor is a monochrome green CRT. Teh two floppy drives are Panasonic or Matsushita JU-455-5-AAG ; pretty sure that's 360K. Date codes suggest this was built in 1983 - the IBM PC was first shipped in 1981.

I know the monitor's green, because (to my surprise) it came up! I used a Variac to slowly apply power over several minutes, then the screen just POPPED up! Haven't tried to boot an IBM PC MS-DOS disk. My guess is that it will need a specific MS-DOS tailored to this hardware.

- Herb Johnson

Copyright © 2012 Herb Johnson