RM Nimbus 186
These computers were produced by Research Machines (www.rm.com) for educational purposes. It appears that they did all the development and building of the Motherboard and I/O boards. The boards seem to be built according to the needs of the computer that they are going to be used in, as boards of the same part number are not all the same, there are additional chips and connectors on some of them.

The mouse that they use seems to be specific to these computers as a normal serial mouse will not work on them. They all have a phone type printer and Piconet connector on the back but some also have a 25 pin parallel printer outlet as well, this is a ribbon type connector and underneath that there are two outlets one 5 volt and one 12 volt I presume these are power supplies for the printers concerned.
This one was actually found by a friend in a skip outside a primary school

AMD/Intel N80186

Memory 572K

FDD 3.5" 720K

System Comprises

RM Nimbus colour monitor model no. RM1404 which connects via an 7/8 pin din cable. 8 pins at the CPU end and 7 pins at the monitor end.

RM Nimbus keyboard 5 pin din connector

RM Nimbus mouse (Manufactured by Logitec) Model no. P8-2F-RM

Citizen 120D dot matrix printer which connects via a 25DMale - phone type connector.

 

 

RM Nimbus 186 20MB

 

This one is very similar to the one above, except for the fact that it has a hard disk and a slightly larger memory. The hard drive is a Seagate ST- 225N which is a 20MB SCSI drive, although the connector on the hard drive has 50 pins they only use 34 of them. The extra memory is on an additional expansion board which is connected to the motherboard by a single row of 40 pins.

The Operating system on this is DOS 3.10 and it has got Windows 3.0 installed, which is apparently a heavily modified version, presumably so that it will run on a 186. There are also some of the old Primary school educational type programs on it as well, such as Paintspa which is a painting program , and Newsdesk which is an editing program that allows you to set-up a page to print like a newspaper.
This computer was given to me by a young lady that works for RM who said that she no longer needed it.

CPU AMD/Intel N80186

HDD Seagate ST-225N 20MB

FDD 3.5" 720K

Memory 1024Kb

DOS 3.1

Windows 3.0
This is the inside of the RM 186 20MB. In the centre at the front is the ST-225N 5.5" hard disk with the ribbon for the floppy disk going over the top of it. At the rear on the left is the ribbon that connects all the I/O cards which you can see a bit clearer in the photo below, it looks as though it can take up to 4 cards on it.
 

 

 

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Last Updated 13th September 2002