This Ericsson PC was a lucky find on Gumtree and only set me back by £0. The seller was an ex-Ericsson employee who had been issued with it to work from home. It's an XT class PC with some interesting differences, such as the floppy disc drive controller, serial and parallel port I/O all integrated on the motherboard. It has monochrome graphics which I've read isn't fully MDA compatible, and interestingly the monitor is powered through the display cable from the graphics card, open circuit the supply measures 63V DC. The PC PSU also has an unused connector at 85V DC, I haven't managed to find out what it's for.
Restoring it has mostly been fairly straightforward. The RIFA caps (4 in the PSU and 3 in the monitor) all needed to be replaced, the cases were all in a bad condition and the ones in the monitor were visibly heat damaged. No other caps needed to be replaced, no tants were shorted and no electrolytics showed any signs of leaking. Internally the PC had little dust with no heavy buildups anywhere, so cleaning was straightforward. The monitor needed a bit more work as it had suffered from a nicotine buildup which wasn't easy to clean off, and some connections to the ribbon cable connecting PCBs were iffy. On first powering the monitor up it let out smoke, but this turned out to be from the ribbon cable touching a 1R resistor that runs hot. Unfortunately the Miniscribe HDD isn't happy, it's been through a few different error codes and has refused to cooperate. I'm currently looking into it but don't hold out much hope for it, so anticipate fitting an XT-IDE card to this PC.
General specs are:
Intel 8088 CPU at 4.77MHz
640kB RAM (including the 512kB expansion card)
Teac FD-55BV 360kB 5.25" FDD
Miniscribe 3212 10MB MFM HDD with an Adaptec 400126-00 control card
80x25 character monochrome graphics with a 12" monitor (the photos don't do justice to that lovely amber display)
