Amstrad PPC512 Portable Personal Computer

Posted by musovern on May 12th, 2022 in Amstrad, Vintage Computers | 0 comments

The PPC512 had an NEC V30 processor running at 8 MHz, 512 KiB of memory, a full-size 102-key keyboard with a numeric keypad, a built-in liquid crystal display (not backlit)[1] that could emulate the CGA or MDA and either one or two 720k 3.5″ floppy drives (the model was either the PPC512S or PPC512D depending on the number of drives it had). The PPC640 was otherwise identical except that it had 640 KiB of memory, a built-in 2400 baud modem (unusually fast for its day), and its case was a darker shade of grey. Both versions of the machine had an empty socket on the main circuit board so that an Intel 8087 coprocessor could be installed to permit hardware processing of floating point arithmetic.

The PPC included standard connectors for RS-232, Centronics and CGA/MDA video, allowing existing peripherals to be used. All the signals used by the 8-bit ISA bus were also available through a pair of expansion connectors. There was available an external card cage for expansion cards.

This is my unit running MS-DOS 3.3,

Just love these old displays