EPSON Personal Computer

The EPSON PC had four components:-

Computer

Mus.Cat. NEWUC:2015.1.1 Mnfctr: EPSON CORPORATION Date: 1983 Ser. No: 510680 Model: Q701A
Comp: Personal Computer Length: 335 mm Width: 504 mm Height: 102 mm Weight: 9 Kg

Keyboard

Mus.Cat. NEWUC:2015.1.2 Mnfctr: EPSON CORPORATION Date: 1983 Ser. No: 011143 Model: Q703B-UA
Comp: Keyboard Length: 508 mm Width: 220 mm Height: 407 mm Weight: 2.5 Kg

Monitor

Mus.Cat. NEWUC:2015.1.3 Mnfctr: EPSON CORPORATION Date: 1983 Ser. No: 16990 Model: Q702A
Comp: Monitor Length: 340 mm Width: 212 mm Height: 266 mm Weight: 4.8 Kg

Printer

Mus.Cat. NEWUC:2015.1.4 Mnfctr: EPSON CORPORATION Date: 1983 Ser. No: 811929 Model: FX-80
Comp: Dot Matrix Printer Length: 415 mm Width: 347 mm Height: 900 mm Weight: 6.5 Kg

This is all four together:-


 

and the rear view. (No cables but I could rustle some up.)


 


On the rear are left to right (they are all seen best in FULLSIZE photograph) :
Power socket, LIGHT PEN socket, MONITOR socket, 6 dip switches, SPEAKER volume control, PRINTER port, RS232C socket, and 4 blanks labelled OP#1 OP#2 OP#3 OP#4 where expansion cards can be connected to external devices.

 

This is the processor box opened up.


On the right are two 5¼:" 340 KByte floppy disk drives.
Above the floppy drives is a card from a PCI slot on the mother board. (more about it later.)
To the left of the Mother Board is a Daughter Board. (More later.)
Below the Mother Board is the Power Supply.

 


This is the Mother Board. To the lower right is three 40 pin chips. The leftmost is a D780C-1 chip. This is the 4MHz Z80 CPU. To the right of it are two D8237AC-5 chips, they are HIGH PERFORMANCE PROGRAMMABLE DMA CONTROLLERS. (DMA - Direct Memory Access.)

To the left a bit above is D765AC chip. GOOGLING it gives "Single/Double Density Floppy-Disk Controllers".

Top left is three blocks of 8 brown 16 pin HN4864p-2 chips labelled BANK1, BANK2 and BANK3. Googling "HN4864P-2" gives 65536 x 1-Bit DRAM. (DRAM is an acronym of Dynamic Random Access Memory.) So each Bank is 64KByte of RAM, totalling 192KByte.

 


This is the daughter board. The big chip D7220-1 is a High-Performance Graphics Display Controller. The two columns of eight 16pin D416C chips above left are 16K x 1, Page Mode Dynamic RAM. So that is 32KByte of fast Random Access Memory to supply the image on the moniter.

 


This is the card from the expansion slot. It has got a 24 pin DIM chip D2716D which is 16K UV Erasable PROM, but found nothing about the other DIMs. I am guessing the 40 pin DIM is a microprocessor.

Then I found a Yet another computer museum which has a photograph of the same expansion card. The QX-10 has a MultiFont functionality via this expansion card.

 


The power supply.

 


The keyboard in bits, lots of bits.

 


Keyboard.

 


Inside the monitor. It is a Cathode Ray Tube which inside is a vacuum with an electron gun at the narrow end on the right to a flourescent screen on the left controlling the electron beam to scan horizontally and then vertically to produce a raster image.

 


The other side. There are a lot of bits and pieces connected by wires, cost a fair amount to make.

 


The inside of the EPSON FX80 DOT MATRIX PRINTER.

 


 

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