and Gateway to build and sell their own systems. Setup only required connections to power, keyboard and mouse. Setup time was seconds. All the software came preloaded so it was the perfect consumer system.
The system I got for my oldest daughter when she went to Drexel University had the 166 Mhz AMD CPU, 2 Gb disk, 33.6 modem, 12x CD ROM and a network port, running Windows 95. I upgraded the memory to improve the performance. While the 166 CPU is not that fast, it ran Microsoft Works very well. It also ran all of the Drexel software they give the students.
The computer magazine reviews were quite favorable to the system. It's design and ease of use prompted Dell Computer and Gateway to build and sell their own systems. Setup only required connections to power, keyboard and mouse. Setup time was seconds. All the software came preloaded so it was the perfect consumer system.
The system was not without some quirks. First the system only has one ISA card which limits the upgrades. (Remember this is before USB) Because of the small form factor there is only room for a single disk drive.
The screen is 640 * 480 in size. The system will also run in 800*600 mode. The problem is that the screen can only display 640 * 480. This means you need to move the viewport around to see all of the desktop. It was a pain to do, so most people always ran it in the lower resolution.
The Monorail is still in use today as a 'web-terminal' for browsing and e-mail. Not bad for an eight year old (2003) system.
pages has some interesting pictures of inside the main system unit.
has the story of his Monorail and as of November 2002 it was still in use.
in finding more about the Monorail.
[#1] For some reason I'm into unique designs so most of the things I own like the PT Cruiser and the Monorail are "different".