My Dad owned the first computer store in Cornwall, Ontario, back in 1981, and we sold Ohio Scientific. A Superboard was the first product I ever sold personally. I still remember my hands shaking as I ran the Chargex (precursor to Visa card in Canada) imprint machine over the card and filled in the amount (C$459 + 7%PST).

The Challenger 1P was just the Superboard in a case, so its the same machine. And hooking it up to a TV would be simple now, since it has a raw video output, and most modern TVs have RCA jacks for baseband video input. Way back then, you needed an RF modulator. The tough part would be finding that extra 4K of memory that used to cost $200.

In my basement sits a Challenger 4P with two 8" floppy drives awaiting the same treatment, along with a few Apple 2 clones. Someday I'll get my hands on a Kaypro. All these things show up on ebay on a fairly regular basis.

Beyond nostalgia, I still think these old machines are great for learning the basics of computing, from the processor on out. Enjoy.

Posted by Greg Trasuk on July 26, 2005 at 04:46 PM BST #

Opps - not Grant Weiland (he's a vet in London) - the OSI BASIC was written by Richard Weiland. And if you see him, tell him there's bug in his string garbage collector. When compacting the strings he forgot he had 16-bit string lengths on the 6502 version whereas the 8080 version had 8-bit, which meant that the string header pointers were four bytes instead of three, which meant that the garbage collection routine mangled the string table when it deleted anything). This might have been fixed in the Compukit, which used EPROMS, but the OSI had masked ROMs. It was also fixed in OS-65D disk-loaded BASIC - not sure who wrote that. Ideas?

Posted by Frank Leonhardt on October 25, 2005 at 01:15 AM BST #

The garbage collector was concerned only with the ASCII string variable heap. The BASIC interpreter kept pointers into the heap to the start of each string, and its length (2x16-bit numbers). If a string operation extended the length of a string it added the new version to the end of the heap, adjusting the pointers as required and leaving the old version wasting space. If you ran out of heap the garbage collector would kick in and shuffle everything down, leaving all free space at the end of the heap. The 8080 BASIC only had eight bits for the string length, meaning the string pointer table had three-byte entries (the first two being a pointer to the start). I strongly suspect that this garbage collector was ported to the 6502 without implementing the 16-bit string lengths - which meant it messed up completely if it was ever used. Therefore, the more RAM you had, the less chance you had of kicking off the garbage collector. If you did cause it to invoke, the machine would die with a twitching screen. It was possible to fix the garbage collector by replacing one of the ROMs (BASIC3 IIRC, but it was a long time ago!). Personally I replaced the 2K ROMs with 6116 RAMs and had a very customised BASIC loaded from disk.

Posted by Frank Leonhardt on April 01, 2006 at 07:10 PM BST #

Richard Weiland died this last Saturday, June 24th, 2006. I spoke with him Friday regarding the "bug" you mentioned. His mind was elsewhere, but he chuckled.

Posted by Tree on June 30, 2006 at 09:06 PM BST #

I built my Compukit UK101 just as Maggie Thatcher came to power. I took a couple of days checking for solder splashes after soldering in all the keys and sockets. Plugged in the chips and had it running on my landlady's kitchen TV first time. My various mods included:

• soon had it running reliably at 2MHz
• got the CUTS interface up to 600Hz
• fitted a small capacitor to the RESET switch so it started up cleanly
• enlarged the power supply capacitor and heat sink - this cured the horizontal stiping on the display
• subsequently ran it on an auto-transformer to drop the voltage to keep the power supply cool

For the next 5 years, I looked at benchmarks of other machines:

• Sinclair Spectrum
• BBC Model B
• Dragon
• Osborne
• Research Machines
• Apple II
• IBM PC

As far as BASIC went, the Compukit wiped the floor with them all - for years! Considering Microsoft were behind most of the BASIC ROMs, I don't understand why the Compukit was so fast. I can only assume they used a more rough-and-ready set of floating point routines. They seemed fine to 7 digits though.

Posted by Andy Robb on July 31, 2006 at 06:20 PM BST #

Sorry to hear about the creator of the UK101 BASIC. The string garbage collection bug was fixed on the UK101 when Comp Shop issued a new EPROM (BAS03). Oh, and the UK101 did respond to "A" at the MEMORY SIZE? prompt, but it displayed THIS IS THE COMPUKIT UK101. Looks like somebody found that one and changed it!

Posted by John Honniball on January 28, 2008 at 12:37 AM GMT #

In the Microsoft 10K basic that we used in the Tangerine Microtan 65 and subsquently the Oric 1 and Oric Atmos, if you entered 'A' to the memory size question at boot up, it would reply 'Writen by 'Weiland & Gates'

This Basic also had the garbage collection bug but you could force garbage collection by pressing control 'e' at any time. The machine would then pause for a few minutes while it cleaned up any un-needed text strings.

regards

Paul K
Cambridge, UK

Posted by Paul Kaufman on December 02, 2008 at 04:35 PM GMT #