I'm happy to see IBM compatible forums now, I was going to suggest them but didn't know how much interest there would be on a mostly Apple-centric site. I thought I'd help kick off this section by showing one of my favourite 8088 PCs.
I was lucky enough to find this machine on eBay in 2019, it came with the box, keyboard, stand, and original DR-DOS 5.0 boot floppies which appear to be slightly customised (it mentions the Carry-I specifically when booting). There were several models in the Carry-I line with specs ranging from 8088 to Pentium 1, some of which were diskless nodes. This model features built-in MDA and CGA video output via a DB9 connector (also a composite RCA connector for CGA which really comes in handy), gameport, serial, parallel, and a connector for an external floppy drive (unsure of the pinout). As for it's specs, from memory I believe it has an AMD branded 8088 and 640KB RAM, and the floppy drive only supports 720KB disks despite being a fully-fledged 1.44MB drive. Unfortunately it doesn't have IDE on the motherboard and there aren't any ISA slots, so it's lucky I have a working parallel port hard drive.
After it arrived, I quickly realised I had to find a similarly miniature monitor to go along with it and chanced upon a 5" black and white composite CRT when visiting my collector friends in South Australia. Paired with my MicroSolutions parallel BackPack HDD, it almost looks like it was designed for the Carry-I! Something else of note is that the keyboard is able to automatically switch between XT and AT modes, making it very useful when I'm repairing PCs of that era - especially with how little space it takes up on my workbench.
It's always fun to get out this machine and mess around with different monitor setups, it's how I justify owning so many CRTs
Having both DB9 and RCA outputs for CGA makes it easier to run two monitors at once for some funky looks.
I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a 9" monochrome CGA display earlier this year, and I think it matches the Carry-I quite nicely. This is what I would consider to be its default configuration now, as the monitor is extremely similar to the ones sold by Flytech for this PC. Now if only the tube were amber...
I was lucky enough to find this machine on eBay in 2019, it came with the box, keyboard, stand, and original DR-DOS 5.0 boot floppies which appear to be slightly customised (it mentions the Carry-I specifically when booting). There were several models in the Carry-I line with specs ranging from 8088 to Pentium 1, some of which were diskless nodes. This model features built-in MDA and CGA video output via a DB9 connector (also a composite RCA connector for CGA which really comes in handy), gameport, serial, parallel, and a connector for an external floppy drive (unsure of the pinout). As for it's specs, from memory I believe it has an AMD branded 8088 and 640KB RAM, and the floppy drive only supports 720KB disks despite being a fully-fledged 1.44MB drive. Unfortunately it doesn't have IDE on the motherboard and there aren't any ISA slots, so it's lucky I have a working parallel port hard drive.
After it arrived, I quickly realised I had to find a similarly miniature monitor to go along with it and chanced upon a 5" black and white composite CRT when visiting my collector friends in South Australia. Paired with my MicroSolutions parallel BackPack HDD, it almost looks like it was designed for the Carry-I! Something else of note is that the keyboard is able to automatically switch between XT and AT modes, making it very useful when I'm repairing PCs of that era - especially with how little space it takes up on my workbench.
It's always fun to get out this machine and mess around with different monitor setups, it's how I justify owning so many CRTs
Having both DB9 and RCA outputs for CGA makes it easier to run two monitors at once for some funky looks.
I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a 9" monochrome CGA display earlier this year, and I think it matches the Carry-I quite nicely. This is what I would consider to be its default configuration now, as the monitor is extremely similar to the ones sold by Flytech for this PC. Now if only the tube were amber...
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