WHERE OLD COMPUTERS ARE WELCOME
| Name | Microbee 32 |
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| Manufacturer | Applied Technology () | Type | Desktop |
| Production start (mm-yyyy) | 1982 | Production end (mm-yyyy) | - 1990 |
| RAM | 32Kb | ROM | 16Kb |
| CPU | Z80A - 2 (later 3.375) Mhz | ||
| Operating System | 16Kb Microworld BASIC | ||
| Text (Cols x Rows) | 64 x 16 | ||
| Graphics | |||
| Sound | It was just a one-bit speaker, driven off a line of the PIO. Mono. You could do PCM and acheve some very impressive results, but it was really unimpressive otherwise | ||
| Storage memory | Cassette | ||
| Serial port | People did RS-232 by emulation off the PIO. | Parallel port | It has a parallel port driven by the Z-80 PIO. |
| Others port | Tape (300 and 1200 baud), composite video output. Expansion bus. | ||
| Original price | Currency original price | ||
| Units sold | |||
| Note | It has a Programmable Character Generator (PCG) graphics, so characters 0..127 were ROM’d. Characters 128..255 were mapped to RAM, so you could custom-design 128 characters. But this meant that you could have 128 of the 1024 (64x16 chars on a screen) as custom, and no more. So it didn’t really have a graphics mode at all. | ||
| Configurations | They are several versions of the Microbee 32: - 32k Home built - 2mHz clock, Z80 - 32k IC (with EDASM) - 3.375 mHz clock. All later Z80 Microbees run at this speed though many were over clocked up to 6 mHz. - 32k Personal Communicator (with Basic, Telcom terminal program and Wordbee - a word processor in ROM) - 32k PC85 (Word processor, Basic, Spreadsheet, Database in ROM) - the last of the line for ROM based machines - very neat and with built in networking. Notes added by Ian Farquhar: RAM was implemented in CMOS static RAM (6116 chips, from memory), and was battery backed-up! So if you turned off the ‘bee, your program was still there when you turned it back on. All the system did was a warm restart. |
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| User | juanvm | ||
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Users' comments
| User | Date | Text |
| Pedro | 28/11/2021 03:28:29 | The microbees I have in the shed somewhere were hacked extensively- including 64kCMOS memboard; floppy disc interface; floppy disc expansion systems ( 720k 1.44 and the 1.2meg SD and DD floppies; 64k dynamic ram board. The expansion interface was easy to match to new chip designs new to the market. Software included a version of FORTH; DOS in FORTH; a single pass assembler. All buried somewhere! |
Are there some errors? Do you have other info? .
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