The New Haul

So that moratorium on buying new Computers? Yeah that’s totally gone. Look what I got!

So I got an incredibly kind offer of a Microbee, with box, no less, and two more “spare parts” systems that were nearly complete.

The Microbee is another Z80 based system. Later models ran CP/M with disk drives but these are from earlier series systems. The system is built around two boards. The lower board has the CPU, video chip and I/O. The upper board has the RAM. Interestingly, in this case that consists of 16k or 32k of SRAM. Yes, SRAM, not DRAM. There’s also a monster Capacitor on board, so it can be turned off for “some time” and not lose the contents of the SRAM. An interesting design. EDIT: This is incorrect. That’s just for smoothing the power supply. There’s a battery (As I found when I opened the sealed unit) that backs up the SRAM.

There’s a key cable I’ll need to make for these that is a DIN 5 on one end and is cassette in and out on the other plus power plus Composite on one cable! Should be fairly easy to make up so I’ll probably be visiting my local Jaycar this weekend.

EDIT: I have a working unit!