I Have rainbow software i see people are looking for
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Brian Richards (USA)
Sunday 16th December 2012
Suitable Solutions sold not only the 286 accelerator boards and clock chips but also DOS3.10 AND the adaptation kits for Windows/286 and later Windows 3.0. You could run MS-Excel (which was a poorer number-cruncher than 1-2-3 but did offer better publication graphing). Suitable Solutions also sold the I-Drive- external DS/DD IBM format drive. $I''m reminded of this as I inventory my Rainbow equipment for eventual ebay-ing or other sale)
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Mark Graybill (United States)
Saturday 18th December 2010
I have a fondness for the Rainbow 100 because it was how I started my software business back in 1983 (after selling a beautiful ''67 SS 350 Camaro to buy the Rainbow. I still have the very first DEC Rainbow sold by Computerland in the San Fernando Valley.
I originally wrote a formatting program for the Rainbow, and later wrote Media Master, a disk-to-disk format conversion program. That work in the floppy disk controller world eventually led to the creation of the Fastback Plus backup programs for the Mac and PC.
Dan Pleasant brought Code Blue to me to market while he was working at HP back in the day. He later was a major contributor to Fastback for the Mac. If you guys are interested, there is some history posted at the homepage URL.
For those trying to figure out direct screen I/O, I would say it is extremely difficult. I poked around the BIOS back then to try to help my friend Dave Grenewetski (later the CEO of Mindscape) figure out how he might port his graphics program on the Osborne to the Rainbow. I don''t remember the exact reason why now, but I do know I concluded it was more work than the market size merited.
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Douglas W. Goodall (United States)
Saturday 9th October 2010
I recently restored a Rainbow 100 and I am trying to write some software for it. It is slow going with only the BDOS calls. I wish I could talk to the hardware a bit. Any information would be very appreciated I was a Digital Research Engineer and have a fondness for the machine.\
doug@goodall.com
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Fred Einstein (Cincinnati, OH USA)
Friday 2nd April 2010
While working at DEC, I actually wrote MS-DOS 3.3 for the Rainbow 100. The machine had several operating system choices for it. You could run CPM-80 on the Z80 microprocessor, CPM/86 on the 8088, MS-DOS on the 8088, VENIX (a UNIX v5 implementation) on the 8088, MPM (a multi-tasking version of CPM/86), and even Windows 1.0 which was adapted for the Rainbow at DEC by a guy named Alpo Kalio (a brilliant engineer). Windows ran on the hardware-assisted graphics card. The unique part of the hardware is that the two CPU''s could share a 2K space in RAM which allowed them to communicate. Thus, the floppy disc handling was done totally by the Z80 while the rest of the system I/O was done by the 8088. Pretty advanced engineering!
The biggest definciency of the Rainbow was the fact that early versions of it had no support for software writers. On the IBM PC, you could call various BIOS functions such as INT 10H to do elementary text and graphics on the screen. The Rainbow, until DOS v2.11 had no such support. Thus, software writers such as Lotus 1-2-3 had a heckava time trying to talk directly at the hardware in order to do text and graphics. Later on, as the Rainbow was dying, I produced a complete Software Development Kit for the Rainbow which had a rich set of interfaces for doing text and graphics. I also wrote a driver so that the Rainbow could read and write single-sided IBM floppies and so that the IBM PC could read Rainbow''s 10 sector per track single sided floppies.
Later on, the morons at DEC (which had a very hierarchical management structure) tried to clone the IBM AT in a single box. They called this monstrosity the VAXMate. Unfortunately, one of the engineers who was working on the non-infringing BIOS actually stole some of IBM''s code verbatim. This caused all sorts of legal problems for DEC. Ken Olsen, the short-sighted owner of DEC, demanded that the VAXMate be produced with monochrome EGA graphics and without a fan. Thus, the thing constantly overheated. I think that DEC may have sold 1 or 2 of these horrid machines. I had already departed for Microsoft by the time that DEC tried to get this VAXMate thing off the ground.
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Rich Allen (Tucson AZ USA)
Sunday 17th May 2009
The Rainbow 100 was the computer I really wanted but couldn''t afford. It could run CP/M and MS DOS... in those days there was a trove of CP/M software and DOS was just getting off the launch pad. I miss the days when there were so many different platforms.
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S.R. (USA)
Thursday 15th June 2006
I used to use Code Blue, an IBM PC Emulator, to run Omega. A very enjoyable Rogue-like game. The dungeons took upwards of 15 minutes to load.
Also there was an excellent word processor, WPS for both CPM and DOS.
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Mike T. (UK)
Friday 1st April 2005
The text mentions that the DEC introduced a 80286 based system called a VAX-station - this was I expect actually a VAX-mate (or DEC-mate). (A VAX station is a different thing altogether).
It also appears to be little known that the DEC Rainbow had hi-res colour graphics and that it was possible to display graphics and text on two separate screens at the same time (one text only and the other for colour graphics) - not bad for a machine that came out before the PC era even started...
It's biggest technical flaw was the lack 'standard' interface bus - in the end this didn't matter as DEC simply didn't comprehend the potential for a market in personal computers.
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J.C. (United States)
Sunday 2nd November 2003
I found some old "Rainbow 100" floppies in a garage sale. I plugged in my ol' 5.25" drive into a fairly modern system with Linux installed. It turns out that if you tweak the /dev/fd0 device using setfdprm it's possible to copy off the contents of the Rainbow 100 floppies. Just specify that the disk is single-sided, double-density, 10 sectors/track, 80 tracks, 800 sectors total, 512 bytes/sector. The sectors are organized by a 2:1 interleave pattern except in tracks 0 and 1 (I don't know how to tell setfdprm this). Don't forget to try adding rate=1 when using setfdprm. You should be able then to use dd or cp to copy the contents to a file. Even when this is done, however, don't expect to be able to mount it. The first two tracks are loader code, or something. One floppy had MS-DOS 3.0 on it and I couldn't find the boot sector (but the FAT and root directory began immediately on track 2) so extracting files would probably involve manually copying parts of the image to other files.
Good luck.
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Frank Gilbert (Earth)
Monday 2nd June 2003
Thanks for the great site. Nostalgia for us old-timers. I remember porting a BASIC program I had written for the PC, to the Rainbow. All the screens had to be re-coded as Rainbow only had 23 lines while the PC had 24. Bummer!
The Rainbow 100 was a microcomputer introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1982. This desktop unit had a monitor similar to the VT220 in a dual-CPU box with both 4 MHz Zilog Z80 and 4.81 MHz Intel 8088 CPUs. The Rainbow 100 was a triple-use machine: VT100 mode (industry standard terminal for interacting with DEC's own VAX), 8-bit CP/M mode (using the Z80), and CP/M-86 or MS-DOS mode using the 8088.
Models
The Rainbow came in three models, the 100A, 100B and 100+. The "A" model was the first released, followed later by the "B" model. The most noticeable differences between the two models were the firmware and slight hardware changes.
The "A" model was the first produced by Digital. The distinguishing characteristic of the "A" model from an end-user perspective was that the earlier firmware did not support booting from a hard disk. Other distinguishing hardware features included the three 2764 (8 KB) ROM chips holding the system firmware and the case fan/power supply combinations. In addition, the 100A was unable to move its hardware interrupt vectors to avoid the conflict with MS-DOS soft INT 21, etc. DOS had to take unusual actions to distinguish between the hard and soft vectors. The Rainbow 100A initially only supported 256 KB of RAM total, but the limitation in the memory expansion slot was later worked around with a special adapter card, though the maximum was limited to 828 KB.
The "B" model followed the "A" model, and introduced a number of changes. The "B" model featured the ability to boot from a hard disk (referred to as the Winchester drive) via the boot menu due to updated firmware. The hardware changes included bigger firmware stored on two 27128 (16 KB) ROMs and an improved case fan/power supply. The firmware allowed selection of the boot screen language and keyboard layout, eliminating the need to switch ROM. The "B" model also allowed remapping of hardware interrupts to be more compatible with MS-DOS. The B model also improved the memory expansion slot to allow a maximum configuration of 892 KB.
The "100+" model was actually a marketing designation signifying that the system shipped with a hard drive installed; the "100+" and "B" models were identical in all other respects. When a hard-disk option was installed on the Rainbow, the kit included the 100+ emblem for the computer's case.
Hardware
The Rainbow contained two separate data buses controlled by the Zilog Z80 and the Intel 8088 respectively. The buses exchanged information via a shared 62 KB memory. When not executing 8-bit code, the Zilog Z80 was used for floppy disk access. The 8088 bus was used for control of all other subsystems, including graphics, hard disk access, and communications. While it may have been theoretically possible to load Z80 binary code into the Rainbow to execute alongside 8088 code, this procedure has never been demonstrated.
The 8088 could also be upgraded with an NEC V-20 chip, resulting in about 10-15% speed improvement, but it involved either doing an E-PROM hack (published) or manually selecting the boot mode each time. (It was due to the V-20 being so much faster, and the post used a step/increment timing sequence, the system would respond faster than the number of clock cycles it was told to wait until looking for a response.)
The 100A model shipped with 64 KB memory on the motherboard, while the 100B had 128 KB memory on the motherboard. Daughterboards were available from Digital Equipment Corporation that could increase system memory with up to an additional 768 KB for a total 892 KB for the 100B or 828 KB for the 100A. The difference in max memory was due to the difference in initial memory configuration.
The system was triple boot (in BIOS, and could be set for automatic default boot preference on 100+) and booted in either CP/M, DOS, or VT100 mode. When booted in DOS, the Z-80 acted as an I/O co-processor for the 8088 side, and visa-versa for CP/M mode.
Disk-drives
The floppy disk drives, known as the RX50, accepted proprietary 400 KB single-sided, quad-density 5¼-inch diskettes. Initial versions of the operating systems on the Rainbow did not allow for low-level formatting, requiring users to purchase RX50 media from Digital Equipment Corporation. The high cost of media ($5 per disk) led to accusations of vendor "lock-in" against Digital. However, later versions of MS-DOS and CP/M allowed formatting of diskettes.
Of note was the single motor used to drive both disk drives via a common spindle, which were arranged one on top of the other. That meant that one disk went underneath the first but inserted upside-down. This earned the diskette drive the nickname "toaster". The unusual orientation confused many first-time users, who would complain that the machine would not read the disk. This was remedied later by placing a red arrow on the diskette slots and on the top of the diskettes to indicate which side of the diskette to be inserted into each diskette drive.
Disks formatted for the Rainbow 100 could not be read or written to by other PC computers, even though materially they were the same type of 5'' disk.
Graphics
The base Rainbow system was capable of displaying text in 80×24- or 132×24-character format in monochrome only. The system could apply attributes to text including bolding, double-width, and double-height-double-width.
The graphics option was a user-installable module that added graphics and color display capabilities to the Rainbow system. The Graphic module was based on a NEC 7220 graphic display controller (which was used in the NEC APC among others) and an 8×64 KB DRAM video memory. It enables high resolution color display:
- 400x240 resolution, with 16 colors from a pallette of 4096.
- 800x240 resolution, with 4 colors from a pallette of 4096.
Due to the design of the graphics system, the Rainbow was capable of controlling two monitors simultaneously, one displaying graphics and another displaying text.
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