Digital Rainbow 100 and Rainbow 100+


The front, rear and insides of my Rainbow 100.

I have a thing for really cool features. You know, those little things that most people go 'Oh, it does that? Cool' and you [Geeks] just have to scream 'My God, thats SO sexy!'.

The Rainbow series is sexy.
Alright, its a clunky desktop system that weighs a ton, but its dual processor in the coolest way. The Rainbow has both an intel 8088 (4.8mHz) and a Zilog Z80A (4mHz).
Why is this cool? Because the Rainbow can boot and run both CP/M and DOS software!
In Z80 mode, the 8088 acts as an I/O coprocessor, and in 8088 mode, the Z80 does the same. Very cool, huh?
The Rainbow can also power up as a VT100 dumb terminal as well.

The Rainbow 100 comes with 64k of onboard RAM, the 100+ with 128k - although they can both handle up to a whopping 896k.
Introduced in 1982 it also had the strange single-headed dual-disk RX50 floppy drive, but unlike my DECMate III, the Rainbow also comes with an internal 10MB Winchester hard drive.
Oh, and the floppy disks are a propreitary format, making them useless to other PCs at the time.