Model D

The Leading Edge Model D, released in 1983, was the most ubiquitous of the Leading Edge lineup. This model was the first computer offered by Leading Edge. Given the Model "D" designation, this indicated that the interior hardware was manufactured by South Korean manufacturer Daewoo. The Model D was an XT budget alternative to IBM's offering in the early 1980's. As a result of its affordability, sales for the Model D were in excess of 100,000 units through its first year and sales were strong until its discontinuation in 1989.

The model D offered a bit of a more modern appearance than IBM's offering at the time, but still retained the beige box with monitor set on top look that came to be so common with the PC. At the front of the system, the user could find a power rocker switch, colored in the same beige color as the rest of the case, a reset button, power indicator LED, and a front accessible AT keyboard connector. The included floppy drive(s) are by in large a standard affair but also included drive door locks that the user could slide to the left to more securely lock media inside the drive; the idea being that the user would be less likely to accidently remove a disk while running a program and damaging a file being used.

At the rear of the computer, are the expected connections such as a parallel and serial port, color monitor connector, monochrome monitor connector, and a color / mono selector toggle switch. Case ventilation terminates at the back with the power supply blowing warm exhaust air through louvered vents. The power supply input is near the middle of the rear of the case and directly above it is a handy power passthrough to supply power to the monitor so that the user could opt to leave the monitor's power switch in the on position at all times to allow the monitor to automatically power on and off with the computer at the same time.

Inside the box, the model D offered to the user dual 5.25" 360 KB floppy drives or the option for one 5.25" floppy drive and a hard drive, either a 10, 20, or 30 MB hard drive. 256KB of RAM was standard and an 8088 processor running at 4.77MHz with later models being able to run at 4.77 or 7.16 MHz and all Model Ds supported upgradability with an 8087 math co‐processor. If the customer opted for the dual floppy drive system, then there were four ISA expansion slots available, though optional fixed disk systems utilized one slot for the hard drive controller.

Pack‐in software shipped with the Leading Edge Model D included MS‐DOS 2.11, GW BASIC, a Leading Edge diagnostics disk, and some came packed with Leading Edge's word processor: Leading Edge Word Processor.