Re: OT: For computer nerds of the 80s

Atheist Chaplain wrote:

> 
> I still have my first Microbee :-)
> it started out life with a tape drive and I eventualy bought 720 and
> 144 floppy drives for it. oh and it had a whopping 16k of ram :-) I
> even made an EPROM writer for it complete with my own UV light
> cabinet to erase them. I still have a box full of old floppies full
> of games (any one remember Colossal Cave) and apps (Word Star anyone)
> ahhh CP/M.............

I have fond memories of the Microbee too.

Having gone the ZX81, Exidy Sorceror route I built myself a S100 system
and poured more money than I care to think about into things like
floppy disk controller cards and 8, 2k memory cards.

I built my first Microbee as a kit, I thought it would make a really
neat serial console to the S100 box. Of course the Microbee's
capabilities rapidly outstripped the S100's. I was once the very proud
owner of "Eric the 1/2 meg Bee" - a microbee with 256k of memory
configured as a ram disk. Wordstar and Visicalc ran like a scalded cat
when run entirely from memory.

Round about then I bought two things that stick in my memory - a
Osborne 01 ****table computer and a Kawasaki GPZ1100. They cost the same
to within a couple of bucks - the Kwaka being the more durable......



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