[bitwize]

The 186 produced some obscure, kinda great, but ultimately doomed (due to not being PC compatible) systems in the early 80s. My favorites are the Tandy 2000 and the Mindset. This is one I haven't heard of.

I'm also fascinated by the early Canadian personal computer scene. They were trying some innovative things in the great white North. Things like the mostly PC compatible Hyperion, which beat the Compaq Portable to market by a hair (and which You Can't Do That on Television star Christine McGlade famously carried in to work on her motorcycle), and the NABU, an early network computer concept whose software was downloaded through a television cable network (unlike the ICON it was successfully rescued from total obscurity).

[MarkusWandel]

Another pretty obscure Canadian non-PC 8086 or 8186 was the NABU 1600 or 1200 (never did figure out which was the right number). NOT the NABU that ran off the cable network.

512K RAM, MMU (discrete logic), 4x serial, 10MB hard disk, floppy. No keyboard or video interface; you were expected to use serial terminals, typically three of them for users, with the fourth port used for a printer. Ran Xenix 1.0 which was basically V7 Unix ported to the platform. No networking except what would run over a serial port.

I got a fully working one at a garage sale for $40 in the early 1990s and geeked out with and learned quite a bit about Unix on it for a while. Since it had about the same limitations as a PDP11 and Minix (64K code, 64K data) there was, in those days, a fair bit of software that could be made to run (i.e. lightly ported) easily. I remember getting a vi clone going that used 63K of the possible 64K code space. V7 didn't have a fullscreen editor stock.

Long gone now. By the time Linux became my main OS a few years later, this was still in the "junk" category rather than "valuable collector's item" category and I gave it away.

[MarkusWandel]

For what it's worth, this is where mine went: http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/nabu/index.htm

[chipotle_coyote]

The Tandy 2000 was the only 80186-based machine I'd known of until now. I actually had one for a while, bought from Radio Shack when they were quietly dumping the remaining stock for something like 90% off. It was like a computer from a slightly alternate timeline, one where MS-DOS's original notion of not being tied to PC-specific hardware (e.g., more like CP/M) actually took off.

[bitwize]

Yeah, I had one as a kid. My dad picked a few up during that same fire sale.

In the early 80s, when it wasn't yet clear that PC clones would dominate, it was a wonderful machine: it had a workstation-class (for the time) graphical display and was faster than any IBM product until the second-rev AT came out.

Microsoft was more focused on being cross-platform back then. Multiplan, for instance, ran on an abstract machine and so was ported to everything from minicomputers to the frickin' TI-99/4A. They even tried to consolidate Xenix and MS-DOS on a single unified API called "XeDOS"; fun fact: this is how MS-DOS 2.0 got subdirectories and piping/redirection.

Did you spot the Tandy 2000 used as a prop in Stranger Things? It was the cash register for the video store they used to search for Eddie in I believe Episode 2 of Season 4.

[qingcharles]

British schools were filled with these non-IBM compat, DOS compat 80186 PCs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM_Nimbus

[tengwar2]

The earlier Z80-based RML 380Z and 480Z machines from the same company were interesting as well. They were said to be the only computers designed to work with a boiled sweet shoved in the disk drive. They ran MP/M and CP/NET (effectively networking for CP/M).