The Amstrad CPC is a series of 8-bit home computers produced by Amstrad between 1984 and 1990. It was designed to compete in the mid-1980s home computer market dominated by the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum, where it successfully established itself primarily in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and the German-speaking parts of Europe.
MSX is a standardized home computer architecture, announced by ASCII Corporation on June 16, 1983. It was initially conceived by Microsoft as a product for the Eastern sector, and jointly marketed by Kazuhiko Nishi, the director at ASCII Corporation. Microsoft and Nishi conceived the project as an attempt to create unified standards among various home computing system manufacturers of the period, in the same fashion as the VHS standard for home video tape machines. The first MSX computer sold to the public was a Mitsubishi ML-8000, released on October 21, 1983, thus marking its official release date.
The Pentagon home computer was a clone of the British-made Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128. It was manufactured by amateurs in the former Soviet Union, following freely distributable documentation. Its PCB was copied all over the ex-USSR in 1991-1996, which made it a widespread ZX Spectrum clone. The name "Pentagon" derives from the shape of the original PCB, with a diagonal cut in one of the corners.
The SAM Coupé is an 8-bit British home computer manufactured by Miles Gordon Technology (MGT), based in Swansea in the United Kingdom and released in December 1989.
The Rainbow 100 is a microcomputer introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1982. This desktop unit had a monitor similar to the VT220 and a dual-CPU box with both 4 MHz Zilog Z80 and 4.81 MHz Intel 8088 CPUs. The Rainbow 100 was a triple-use machine: VT100 mode, 8-bit CP/M mode, and CP/M-86 or MS-DOS mode using the 8088. It ultimately failed to succeed in the marketplace which became dominated by the simpler IBM PC and its clones which established the industry standard as compatibility with CP/M became less important than IBM PC compatibility. Writer David Ahl called it a disastrous foray into the personal computer market. The Rainbow was launched along with the similarly packaged DEC Professional and DECmate II which were also not successful. The failure of DEC to gain a significant foothold in the high-volume PC market would be the beginning of the end of the computer hardware industry in New England, as nearly all computer companies located there were focused on minicomputers for large organizations, from DEC to Data General, Wang, Prime, Computervision, Honeywell, and Symbolics Inc.
The ATM Turbo, also known simply as ATM is a ZX Spectrum clone, developed in Moscow in 1991, by two firms, MicroArt and ATM.
A fast loader is a software program for a home computer, such as the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum, that accelerates the speed of file loading from floppy disk or compact cassette.
The ZX Spectrum's software library was very diverse. While the majority of the software produced for the system was video games, others included programming language implementations, Sinclair BASIC extensions, databases, word processors, spread sheets, drawing and painting tools, and 3D modelling tools.
TR-DOS is a disk operating system for the ZX Spectrum with Beta Disc and Beta 128 disc interfaces. TR-DOS and Beta disc were developed by Technology Research Ltd (UK), in 1984. A clone of this interface is also used in the Russian Pentagon and Scorpion machines.
Beta Disk Interface is a disk interface for ZX Spectrum computers, developed by Technology Research Ltd. in 1984 and released in 1985, with a price of £109.25.
The Kay 1024 was a Russian ZX Spectrum clone introduced in 1998. Created by the NEMO company of St. Petersburg, it has 1024 KB of RAM. It was a rival to Scorpion ZS 256, having a slightly lower price. It offered a controller for a PC keyboard and HDD, but not for floppy disks. Adding a General Sound card was easy, and the CPU had a 7 Mhz turbo mode.
TurboDOS is a multi user CP/M like operating system for the Z80 and 8086 CPUs developed by Software 2000 Inc.
ToBoS-FP is a floating point compiler for the Sinclair BASIC on ZX Spectrum. The name stands for Toruń, Jerzy Borkowski, Wojciech Skaba, Floating Point. The compiler was released in Poland in 1986. Source code compilation enables substantial (20+) speed up of execution of programs that are normally interpreted. The acceleration results mostly from the utilization of compiler's own floating point arithmetic library and graphics library that replace the ZX Spectrum built-in routines. In a 1992 independent survey, ToBoS-FP was named the most popular of all known BASIC compilers for the ZX Spectrum. It is still referred to as one of the best BASIC compiler for ZX Spectrum.
The Scorpion ZS-256 was a very widespread ZX Spectrum clone produced in St. Petersburg by Sergey Zonov.
