The PC2 was first introduced in March 1987 in London as the Atari Business PC and, unlike the PC1, was designed as a pure office computer. The computer was delivered from January 1988. In the United Kingdom, the PC2 is the entry-level model, as the PC1 was not offered there. It was not until November 1987 that it was also presented in the USA on the COMDEX case. Compared to the PC1, the housing of the PC2 has the advantage that everything can be accommodated in the same housing. It offers enough space for two 51/4" drives, four plug-in cards, the motherboard and the power supply. In contrast to the PC1 housing, it was made of galvanized and powder-coated sheet steel. The Intel P8088-2 is used here, which is clocked at 4.77 MHz in standard mode and at 8 MHz in turbo mode. The 8088, released in 1979, is a low-priced variant of the Intel 8086, although it works internally like this one with 16 bits, but in contrast has only an 8 bit wide external data bus and a command queue reduced from six to four bytes. In addition, an Intel 8087 mathematical coprocessor can be used. To activate this, the jumper belonging to socket U68 (found on the front edge of the motherboard) must be set to pins 2 and 3 after installation (pins 1 and 2 are bridged by default). |