Drew Wagar's Weblog.

All | Astronomy | Automotive | Identity | Industry | Miscellaneous | Technology | Whinge of the week

« Previous day (Jul 25, 2005) | Main | Next day (Jul 26, 2005) »
20050726 Tuesday July 26, 2005

 Has anyone else heard of the Compukit UK101? My first computer...

It was a pretty rare beast, earlier than the BBC Micro and the ZX80/81/Spectrums, Commodore Vic20 and 64. In the US it was known as the Ohio Superboard.



Based around the venerable 6502 processor it was running at 1Mhz, with 8k of ram and 8k of rom, which contained 'BASIC' by a small little company called Microsoft. Hey, this was 1979!



Other cool features included a memory mapped screen of 80x25 characters, 256 different characters which could be used, a primitive tape interface running at 300 baud and the ability to be plugged into a TV.

It came with only a PCB with the keys plugged into it, no case at all, although we eventually made one for it.

It never hit the mainstream, arriving a little too early for the first home computer revolution in the early 1980s and it was outstriped in capability by the later machines quite quickly as the price points came down. However, some games were written for it, inparticular a very good conversion of space invaders.



There is not much out there on the UK101, but there is one good website, affectionately called 'Coredump' which gives quite a bit of detail, you can even find an emulator there. I have fond memories of it and would like to find one in working condition again as a piece of pure self indulgence and nostalgia.

I'm curious though, does anyone else out there remember this machine? And was it your first computer?

( Jul 26 2005, 09:40:52 AM BST / Jul 26 2005, 09:25:26 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [15]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/has_anyone_else_heard_of


Yep, me.
« July 2005 »
MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
    
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
       
Today



moon phases

Locations of visitors to this page
XML - Get my RSS Feed!

people stopped by, thanks everyone!

My Blog Entries...


Today's Page Hits: 90