The Wave Mate Bullet was a Z80 single-board computer from the late 1970s and early 1980s which used the CP/M operating system. It was sold in Australia, the United States and Europe and was apparently[ vague ] popular in academic settings.
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The Wave Mate Bullet was a Z80 single-board computer from the late 1970s and early 1980s which used the CP/M operating system. It was sold in Australia, the United States and Europe and was apparently[ vague ] popular in academic settings.
The Wave Mate Bullet is notable because it represents CP/M machines at their apex. Small yet affordable machines which were quite powerful at the time with plentiful applications. Wave Mate, Inc. is a historically relevant company because one of the original microcomputer companies which released their first computer kit the Wave Mate Jupiter II in 1975. The Wave Mate Bullet represents the end of the CP/M era as the IBM PC and its clones ascended to marketplace domination. [1]
The Wave Mate Bullet runs CP/M 3.0 and CP/M 2.2 is available. It is available in many configurations but typically is found in a small chassis with two 96 tracks per inch 5.25" floppy disk drives. The 5.25" disks were formatted on both sides with five 1024 byte sectors per track with 80 tracks per side for a total of 800K per disk.
The standard configurations includes two serial ports, a parallel port, a general purpose external DMA bus (GPED), separate connectors for 5.25" and 8" floppy disk drives, and a hard disk interface. The hard disk interface is either IMI hard disk controller model #7710 or SCSI depending on the motherboard version.
The Aster CT-80, an early (1982) home/personal computer developed by the small Dutch company MCP, was sold in its first incarnation as a kit for hobbyists. Later it was sold ready to use. It consisted of several Eurocard PCB's with DIN 41612 connectors, and a backplane all based on a 19-inch rack configuration. It was the first commercially available Dutch personal/home computer. The Aster computer could use the software written for the popular Tandy TRS-80 computer while fixing many of the problems of that computer, but it could also run CP/M software, with a large amount of free memory Transient Program Area, (TPA) and a full 80×25 display, and it could be used as a Videotext terminal. Although the Aster was a clone of the TRS-80 Model I it was in fact more compatible with the TRS-80 Model III, and ran all the software of these systems including games. It also had a built in speaker which was compatible with such games software.
The TRS-80 Micro Computer System is a desktop microcomputer launched in 1977 and sold by Tandy Corporation through their Radio Shack stores. The name is an abbreviation of Tandy Radio Shack, Z80 [microprocessor]. It is one of the earliest mass-produced and mass-marketed retail home computers.
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CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations and were migrated to 16-bit processors.
The Amstrad PCW series is a range of personal computers produced by British company Amstrad from 1985 to 1998, and also sold under licence in Europe as the "Joyce" by the German electronics company Schneider in the early years of the series' life. The PCW, short for Personal Computer Word-processor, was targeted at the wordprocessing and home office markets. When it was launched the cost of a PCW system was under 25% of the cost of almost all IBM-compatible PC systems in the UK, and as a result the machine was very popular both in the UK and in Europe, persuading many technophobes to venture into using computers. However the last two models, introduced in the mid-1990s, were commercial failures, being squeezed out of the market by the falling prices, greater capabilities and wider range of software for IBM-compatible PCs.
86-DOS is a discontinued operating system developed and marketed by Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for its Intel 8086-based computer kit.
The Big Board (1980) and Big Board II (1982) were Z80 based single-board computers designed by Jim Ferguson. They provided a complete CP/M compatible computer system on a single printed circuit board, including CPU, memory, disk drive interface, keyboard and video monitor interface. The printed circuit board was sized to match the Shugart 801 or 851 floppy drive. This allowed attachment to up to two 8 inch or 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drives. The Big Board II added a SASI interface which could be used to drive hard drives, enhancements to system speed and enhancements to the terminal interface.
The Xerox 820 Information Processor is an 8-bit desktop computer sold by Xerox in the early 1980s. The computer runs under the CP/M operating system and uses floppy disk drives for mass storage. The microprocessor board is a licensed variant of the Big Board computer.
The Tandy 2000 is a personal computer introduced by Radio Shack in September 1983 based on the 8 MHz Intel 80186 microprocessor running MS-DOS. By comparison, the IBM PC XT used the older 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 processor, and the IBM PC/AT would later use the newer 6 MHz Intel 80286. Due to the 16-bit-wide data bus and more efficient instruction decoding of the 80186, the Tandy 2000 ran significantly faster than other PC compatibles, and slightly faster than the PC AT. The Tandy 2000 was the company's first computer built around an Intel x86 series microprocessor; previous models used the Zilog Z80 and Motorola 6809 CPUs.
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.
A floppy-disk controller (FDC) has evolved from a discrete set of components on one or more circuit boards to a special-purpose integrated circuit or a component thereof. An FDC directs and controls reading from and writing to a computer's floppy disk drive (FDD). The FDC is responsible for reading data presented from the host computer and converting it to the drive's on-disk format using one of a number of encoding schemes, like FM encoding or MFM encoding, and reading those formats and returning it to its original binary values.
Eagle Computer, Inc., was an early American computer company based in Los Gatos, California. Spun off from Audio-Visual Laboratories (AVL), it first sold a line of popular CP/M computers which were highly praised in the computer magazines of the day. After the IBM PC was launched, Eagle produced the Eagle 1600 series, which ran MS-DOS but were not true clones. When it became evident that the buying public wanted actual clones of the IBM PC, even if a non-clone had better features, Eagle responded with a line of clones, including a portable. The Eagle PCs were always rated highly in computer magazines.
The Z-89 is a personal computer produced by Zenith Data Systems (ZDS) in the early 1980s.
DECmate was the name of a series of PDP-8-compatible computers produced by the Digital Equipment Corporation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. All of the models used an Intersil 6100 or Harris 6120 microprocessor which emulated the 12-bit DEC PDP-8 CPU. They were text-only and used the OS/78 or OS/278 operating systems, which were extensions of OS/8 for the PDP-8. Aimed at the word processing market, they typically ran the WPS-8 word-processing program. Later models optionally had Intel 8080 or Z80 microprocessors which allowed them to run CP/M. The range was a development of the VT78 which was introduced in July 1977.
Corvus Systems was a computer technology company that offered, at various points in its history, computer hardware, software, and complete PC systems.
The Research Machines 380Z was an early 8-bit microcomputer produced by Research Machines in Oxford, England, from 1977 to 1985.
The Macintosh External Disk Drive is the original model in a series of external 3+1⁄2-inch floppy disk drives manufactured and sold by Apple Computer exclusively for the Macintosh series of computers introduced in January 1984. Later, Apple would unify their external drives to work cross-platform between the Macintosh and Apple II product lines, dropping the name "Macintosh" from the drives. Though Apple had been producing external floppy disk drives prior to 1984, they were exclusively developed for the Apple II, III and Lisa computers using the industry standard 5+1⁄4-inch flexible disk format. The Macintosh external drives were the first to widely introduce Sony's new 3+1⁄2-inch rigid disk standard commercially and throughout their product line. Apple produced only one external 3+1⁄2-inch drive exclusively for use with the Apple II series called the Apple UniDisk 3.5.
The floppy disk is a data storage and transfer medium that was ubiquitous from the mid-1970s well into the 2000s. Besides the 3½-inch and 5¼-inch formats used in IBM PC compatible systems, or the 8-inch format that preceded them, many proprietary floppy disk formats were developed, either using a different disk design or special layout and encoding methods for the data held on the disk.
The Olivetti M20 is a Zilog Z8000 based computer designed and released by Olivetti in 1982. Although it offered good performance, it suffered from a lack of software due to its use of the Z8000 processor and custom operating system, PCOS. The company introduced the IBM PC compatible Olivetti M24 in 1983 and the M20 line was phased out.
The Dimension 68000 is a microcomputer introduced by the Micro Craft Corporation in 1983 that sought to emulate the Apple II, the IBM PC, and various CP/M-centric computers through a family of coprocessor expansion cards and emulation software. The Dimension 68000 can also run as a standalone computer based on the Motorola 68000 from which it gets its namesake. The computer is mostly the brainchild of Mike Carpenter, a former executive of a scientific instrument manufacturer who incorporated Micro Craft in Dallas, Texas, to develop the Dimension 68000. It had a market lifespan of three years and received mixed, mostly positive, reception from the technology press. Criticism was leveled at the $6,250 price tag for the computer with the full deck of coprocessor cards, as well as the extent of the emulation power of those cards.
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