International Business Machines
RS/6000 POWERstation 220

[JPEG image of 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 They remained in production until 6 January, 1995 when they were superseded by the Powerstation 250.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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