🚀 go-pugleaf

This may be of some general interest:

> A friend saw an add from DAK Industries (yes, DAK!) which advertised:
> 
> 256k PC-Clone, Amber Monitor, Letter Quality Printer, and $400 software!
> "...unfair challenge to IBM" -- "...a bombshell..."
> 
> All for the great price of: $999+tax (if in CA)
> 
> Does anyone have any info on this beast?  Too good to be true?
> How compat is an "unfair challenge"?  Please reply via Netmail
> if you have any info.  Thanks!
>  
> --Arun Baheti
--------------------------

I recently purchased the Visual "Commuter" IBM compatible from DAK for
my daughter to take to college with her in the fall. Right now it is in
my son's room where he is testing it with every game he can get his
hands on. I have also tried a variety of software packages with it that
I think might be useful to my daughter and have found nothing that
won't run. It doesn't have the BASIC in ROM of course. The software that
comes with it is basically worthless as far as I'm concerned but would
get you started. It comes with DOS 2.11.

You should understand ahead of time though that it is software
compatible - not hardware. There are no card slots to plug in expansion
goodies. There is a connector on the back to plug in an expansion box
but that costs more $'s and I don't know what problems you might have
adding something like a hard disk. So you're basically stuck with what
you've got. Don't know what long term support you can expect from
Visual. The printer is very slow but the results look good.

So far I have only a few complaints:
  1. The display driver is like the IBM CGA in that it does
     not produce grey scale on the monochrome monitor. There
     is an adapter I've seen mail order for $50-60 though that
     could be used to clean that up.
  2. I decided to save the $100 that DAK wanted to go from 256K
     to 512K by adding the extra memory myself. That turned out
     to be a mistake. The 256K memory only cost me $27 locally,
     but it turns out that you need a custom PLA from Visual to
     address the extra memory for which they charge $75. So it's
     just about a wash - but I don't know if I have voided my
     warranty. It's also somewhat of a pain to get the machine
     apart to work on it. I also decided to pay $50 for the
     service manual in case there is trouble with Visual support
     in the future.
  3. It does not have a battery run clock which I consider to be
     one of the most useful add on's. There again I have seen add
     on clocks that don't require an expansion slot so maybe there
     is an out.

There is one serial and one parallel port standard. There is a connector
for a second serial port. I don't know if you get into custom chip
problems if you want to add the hardware for the second serial port.

Overall I'm happy with both the Visual and with DAK. I believe it will
serve my purposes quite well. One of my primary concerns, however, was
a system that was light enough for my daughter to handle setting up
(and moving out of the way when she had to). I suspect that you can
get as good a deal on a hardware compatible system elsewhere.

--Bob Dukelow