International Business Machines RS/6000 POWERstation 220

    IBM announced this little machine on the 21st of January, 1992 and they became available on the 24th of April of that year. They remained in production until 6 January, 1995 when they were superseded by the Powerstation 250. It was marketed as an entry- level system.

    The machine uses a single- chip implementation of IBM's POWER (Performance Optimised With Enhanced RISC) architecture runnning at 33 MHz. A floating- point accelerator is standard on these systems. Base memory size is 16Mo on PS/2- style SIMMs and is expandable to 64Mo. SCSI and Ethernet controllers are also standard on the system planar (motherboard). I/O expansion is provided for by a pair of Microchannel slots on a riser card extending vertically from the planar. The SCSI-2 bus is brought out to the rear of the machine so external SCSI peripherals may be connected to it.

    This particular example is pretty well tricked out. It's got a 1Go SCSI-2 disk internally, a 1.44Mo floppy, 64Mo of mainstore, and a token- ring interface in addition to the standard Ethernet controller. Graphics is performed by a Gt1 video controller which has been expanded to handle 256 colours at a resolution of 1024x768 pixels. The Gt1 drives a standard multi-sync monitor very nicely.

    Currently, this machine is the RS/6000 I use when I desire graphics capability (my POWERserver 930 lacks a graphics controller). The system runs IBM's AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) at version 3.2.5 and X11 with the Motif window manager.

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