Delicious Serial
NB Even by the standards of this part-time blog the following post is absurdly obscure. My brother works for a large company who have been in business here since the 1950s. They have a lot of old equipment, and he asked my advice about an elderly PC. It interfaced with some industrial plant and displayed vital statistics about what the machinery was doing. The worry was it might fail one day, and they had no backup or replacement for it. Intrigued, I paid a visit. It turned out to be a Sanyo PC, model number MBC-17LXS. It had a 5.25" floppy disk drive (empty) and interfaced with the plant via a serial cable. The software appeared to be running on DOS, but I couldn't confirm that as they were using the plant that day and didn't want me trying to quit the program. Back home, I did a bit of digging. Not a lot of data on the Sanyo MBC-17LX online but I eventually found this advert in a scanned copy of the August 1990 Popular Electronics magazine: Cool - so the machine was c