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Microbee 32

Applied Technology ()

Previous: Microbee 16
Visits: 6
Name Microbee 32 Applied Technology 
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. 
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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