The PC 6300 was in fact an Olivetti M24 sold under the ATT brand.
Launched a few months after the presentation of six new UNIX super-micro and mini ATT computers (march 1984), the PC 6300 was the first ATT system to be IBM PC compatible. It represented the low-end system of the ATT products.
But the PC-6300 (and the Olivetti M24) was an excellent PC compatible system, twice faster than the IBM PC XT computer thanks to a real 16 bit CPU, the Intel 8086, which ran at 8Mhz as opposed to the 8088 of the IBM PC running at 4,7Mhz. The standard graphic possibilities were also better than those of the IBM PC.
Michael Hildenbrand reports :
When I got it, there was also an option to get a 720k 3.5
floppy with it instead of the 5.25 floppy. When I got mine in 1986, one of the 5.25 floppy drives went bad and I had them replace it under warranty. It would have cost me $500 to replace it if I had had to replace it. Cool machine, anyway. I used that machine for many years!
David Punia adds:
During the early 80's, it became apparent that PC's were becoming an important tool to engineers and to businesses. The University of Vermont, where I worked at the time, was an early adopter of what later became common practice, that of requiring incoming students in certain disciplines to purchase personal computers.
In those days, compatibility was a huge issue, i.e. there was very little, so sole-source vendors were often chosen to supply PC's. The AT&T PC6300 offered a significant performance advantage over the IBM PC and others. It's full 16-bit processor/bus interface, 8 MHz processor, high resolution graphics modes (proprietary to Olivetti/AT&T) and 8087 math coprocessor socket made it a good choice for CAD, circuit analysis, and other graphical and math-intensive applications. There were a couple of 16-bit expansion slots also, but the card configuration was proprietary, eventually supplanted by the PC/AT's form factor for expansion cards.
The design of the chassis was interesting; the motherboard was accessed by removing the bottom cover of the system unit, exposing the entire motherboard. A daughterboard in the upper section of the system unit carried hardware for the expansion slots, and housed the drives. I still have one of these boxed away in my basement, with a side-attached hard drive chassis that could carry a full-height 5.25" hard disk. Mine has a 72 MB Seagate, about 5 pounds and $650 at the time, that dims the lights while it spins up ;-). and makes a loud clunk when the mechanical brake kicks in during power down.
My Commodore 64 was getting long in the tooth when I bought my AT$T 6300 in April 1984. I justified it as a present for having just put myself through 8 years of night college to earn my BSME. It had 640K of RAM, a dual-sided flopppy drive, and a CGA graphics card. I remember paying about $3500 for the computer, 12" monochrome monitor, daisy wheel printer, optical mouse, and an external 300 baud modem. For the next 2 years I would carry the whole system to my cubicle every morning, use it for work, then take it home every night to run my BBS and "game". Eventually the company owners realized that PC''s were actually useful and bought several 6300''s for the engineering staff. I later upgraded the 8086 processor to a V30 and added a whopping-huge 20 MB hard drive. Around 1990 I replaced my 6300 with a 386-based.
I bought one of these used in 1992 to run a BBS. It had a 10MB hard drive that sometimes needed a tap before it would spin up when the system was turned on. Shortly after I bought another that looked like a later model. It didn''t have the translucent red cover on the front like the one pictured on this page$ the first one did. The first one I gave to a friend who ran a BBS on it for a few months before the motherboard literally cracked. I ran my BBS on the second one for a while and then sold to a friend of my brother''s who wanted to use it essentially as a terminal to dial up BBSs. It had an interesting quirk: the system clock would gain about 40 minutes during the course of a single day. It came with a small clock card in one of the expansion slots. I had setup a timed event in the BBS software to run a small program at "midnight" that reset the system time to the time on the clock card. Since after the first time it ran the time was now 11:20 or so, it would run again at "midnight" though even over that short a time it had gained enough to run at least a third time before the real time passed midnight. Good times.
Wednesday 24th March 2010
Nevada Hamaker
My dad worked for AT&T, and had the opportunity to get us a 6300. I remember we had the choice between the dual floppy version, and one floppy/one 20MB hard drive. I almost choose the dual floppy version (the more, the better, right?) until a friend wisely educated me about hard drives. I loved that computer. We eventually had two 6300's and a 6300 Plus that I ran Unix on for awhile. My dad's position at AT&T helped spark my interest, and started me out on my IT career.
Monday 29th October 2007
Brad (Illinois)
NAME
PC 6300
MANUFACTURER
ATT
TYPE
Professional Computer
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
June 1984
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
GW-Basic delivered on disk
KEYBOARD
QWERTY full-stroke keyboard, function keys, separated numeric keypad
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