Applied Technology Microbee 32
1982 · personal computer
Specifications
| Manufacturer | Applied |
|---|---|
| Release year | 1982 |
| Type | PERSONAL COMPUTER |
| CPU | Z80A - 2 (later 3.375) |
| Memory (RAM) | 32Kb |
| 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 âbee, your program was still there when you turned it back on. All the system did was a warm restart. |
| Operating System | 16Kb Microworld BASIC |
| Others port | Tape (300 and 1200 baud), composite video output. Expansion bus. |
| Parallel port | It has a parallel port driven by the Z-80 PIO. |
| Production end (mm-yyyy) | - 1990 |
| ROM | 16Kb |
| Serial port | People did RS-232 by emulation off the PIO. |
| 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 |
| Text (Cols x Rows) | 64 x 16 |
About the Applied Technology Microbee 32
It has a Programmable Character Generator (PCG) graphics, so characters 0..127 were ROMâd. 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 didnât really have a graphics mode at all.
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