Re: OT: For computer nerds of the 80s

On Apr 17, 10:14 pm, "Blue Heeler" <w...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 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

Osborne I had a play about with.

I never really played with S100 stuff. My
Microbee is the "Communicator" model,
and the Z80 address range was only 64K
however I think it has 32KB ram.

The Z80 system I designed and built I
used a techinque to switch out and in
extra memory.

http://img329.imageshack.us/img329/5489/001el5.jpg
http://img212.imageshack.us/img212/641/002od2.jpg

Yeah a lot of wires to solder to build it, wrote a DOS
for it, uses a 1771 disk controller. Don't ask about the
add on card with the LEDs and buttons on it. Yep,
could could program it and run code using that.

No video controller, however serial line. The 4 capacitors
and transistors bottom left was a circuit I designed which
is charge pump. So I had -12 volt and -5 volt for disk
controller and serial ****t. It actually has a 32KB static
RAM chip along with a number of the 6116 2K ones.
Runs the Microbee editor assembler (load from disk).

I just don't have the patience for this stuff now though :-(

That was back in 1988.