🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Added.YbJhA0a00UkT9LkU9C@andrew.cmu.edu>, C491153@UMCVMB.MISSOURI.EDU ("John Schultz") writes:
> I recently purchased a DecMate II at an auction and have a few questions 
> about it.  Is this sucker a Rainbow (or PC compatible in any regards)?  
> If so, is there someone I can make arrangements with to get a boot disk?
> If it is not PC compatible, is anyone interested in it?  ;>

Well, I'm not sure if you can classify the Rainbow as PC compatible
(it's MS-DOS compatible, if you have the Rainbow version of MS-DOS,
which is often good enough).

But to answer your question,  no, the DECmate II is not PC compatible,
nor is it Rainbow compatible.  It's basically a PDP-8 based word
processing system.  Some of them had a Z80 board added which made them
CP/M compatible (the old 8-bit CP/M, not the 16-bit CP/M that is
sometimes seen in the PC world and more often on the DEC Rainbow).
Without that board it's pretty useless by modern standards, unless
you happen to like the DECmate word processing software (which I
understand isn't too bad, though a bit dated compared to more modern
offerings).  If it _does_ have the Z80 CP/M add-on, it's considerably
more useful, but the Z80 and CP/M software are nowhere near the 
mainstream for microcomputers any more.  But there's quite a bit of
good (if old) software for it ... sort of depends on what you want 
the machine for.

No, I'm not particularly interested in it.

Good luck --
						Bruce C. Wright