The Z80's secret feature discovered after 40 years!

spr1975wshs

Mostly settled in...
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Patron
I still have a chipset and schematic for a Z-80 based computer I bought about 40 or so years ago.
One of those round-to-its, I never got around to.

Have the unetched PC board, too.
 

Kyle

ULTRA-F###ING-MAGA!
PREMO Member
My awesome Shack Model 4P was run by a Z80.

The Model 4P offered complete Model 4 compatibility, but in a transportable package with a carry handle. It weighed only 26 pounds and featured a 9 inch screen, two floppy disk drives, and a detachable keyboard with a 16 inch cable that stored below the screen.
Whoohooo! Only 26lbs.

 

Gilligan

#*! boat!
PREMO Member
Whoohooo! Only 26lbs.

banked memory...and TWO floppy drives. And the icing on the cake....a built in mind-blowingly fast 300 baud modem! I was looking at a Kaypro and an Osborne....went for the more expensive 4P because of the awesome features. Spent about the same amount on a dot matrix printer to go with it. Throw in some software apps like Visicalc and ..of course...a DPM operating system... and the incredibly powerful packaged was about $3500 out the door. $3500 was a LOT of money in 1983....
 

Sneakers

Just sneakin' around....
banked memory...and TWO floppy drives. And the icing on the cake....a built in mind-blowingly fast 300 baud modem! I was looking at a Kaypro and an Osborne....went for the more expensive 4P because of the awesome features. Spent about the same amount on a dot matrix printer to go with it. Throw in some software apps like Visicalc and ..of course...a DPM operating system... and the incredibly powerful packaged was about $3500 out the door. $3500 was a LOT of money in 1983....
Sounds familiar.... :lol: 'cept I went with the Atari 800. And bought every peripheral available, every software manual, .... Used it to learn 8086 assembler language and coded my own telecom program for use with a 300 baud modem and our Control Data Cyber computers at work.

Still have all of it boxed in the basement, still all works. Back then the 5.25" floppy drive was over $500. And each peripheral had it's own power cord and transformer, so there were a million cords all over the place plugged into a half dozen power strips.
 

Gilligan

#*! boat!
PREMO Member
Sounds familiar.... :lol: 'cept I went with the Atari 800. And bought every peripheral available, every software manual, .... Used it to learn 8086 assembler language and coded my own telecom program for use with a 300 baud modem and our Control Data Cyber computers at work.

Still have all of it boxed in the basement, still all works. Back then the 5.25" floppy drive was over $500. And each peripheral had it's own power cord and transformer, so there were a million cords all over the place plugged into a half dozen power strips.
I was a member of the First Osborne Group (FOG) BBS and the open-source code published there was amazing..for the time. I was programming in Z80 Assembler and 8086 soon after...and then had to turn around and learn it for the TI-9900. When we migrated to the 80C186/C187 chip set for our marine products, I was out of the controller programming side soon afterward. Still did a ton of simulation program development in Fortran though.

That was all ancient history. SGI does all our software now and I couldn't begin to help with that. He's like that guy in Dilbert...the company can never let him go because he developed all of the company's 1 million lines of spaghetti code that nobody else on the planet could decipher. :lmao:
 
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