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THE LOVE OF MY LIFE

Yugorin Rotaru 10 luty 2023

Australian version of C64 computer from the 80s

It is an Australian design, so not as popular as Commodore 64, etc.

This is what the love of my life looked like during the 80s. I learn't to program BASIC and Z80 assembly language on this computer

It had a Z80 CPU with 32K of RAM.

It had no floppy drives and only cassette tape for storing data.

Some programs you installed from cassette tape and some you installed with EPROMs.
My Z80 assembler, word processor and FORTH programming language came on EPROM.
My computer had "terminal emulation software" installed in EPROM that I used to connect to PDP-11 minicomputer.

As a student, I would write my assembly language source code at home and carry this computer to my campus 40kms away and transfer my source code to the PDP-11 minicomputer, which meant I didn't have to spend long hours at my campus typing in source code.

It was the kind of computer that technical guys in the 80s who specialised in electronics (like me) would buy.

Microbee Series 2 Models
http://www.microbee-mspp.org.au/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Microbee+Series+2+Models

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

Classic Plus Kit Computer
https://www.microbeetechnology.com.au/classic-plus-kit-computer.htm

Microbee Technology
https://www.facebook.com/MicrobeeTechnology

May The force Be with You

by J(@)ck Hoffman - reedited by Master Luke

Komentarze

Kangur

1 year ago

The Australian Microbee computer was first targeted at "hacker" and the first time it was released to the market it was sold as a kit (blank PCB + components which you had to assemble with a soldering iron). It was later sold as an assembled unit.

Since Australians were building their own Microbee the next step was to build all these devices (EPROM programmer, weather sat decoder, RTTY interface, etc, etc ).

So the kind of people who mainly bought the Microbee were computer hackers who could use a soldering iron such as engineers.

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Yugorin Rotaru

1 year ago

Cytuję Kangur:

Re. comments "Australian version of C64 computer from the 80s".

It is nothing like C64 because Microbee has Z80 CPU.

I think that here it is more about a certain mental shortcut of the author. He is talking about his love for this computer and perhaps its popularity in Australia. To him (Jack) the MicroBee is probably the same as the C64 is to us.

all the best
Yugorin