Another real Z80 portable - today we would talk about a netbook... 1987 it wasn't a sensation but very handy
Saturday, March 12, 2011, 10:30 AM
Posted by Administrator
Clive Sinclair's last computer creation was manufactured by his own company Cambridge Computer. It's a Z80 (3.2768 MHz) based very slim and handy laptop, has a LCD display with 6 rows and 80 columns (native resolution is 640x64 pixels), and at least 32KB RAM.
You can use additional cards to extend your storage up to 1 MByte RAM / ROM.
BBC Basic was integrated as a programming language.
Unfortunately this beautiful beast not really had a commercial success, one reason was the proprietary card format, also almost no other vendor developed software for it.
It's still a hot collector item:
For more information, take a look at
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/z88forever/ .
You will see, there are not too much sites / pages about the Z88.
At
sourceforge, a development environment and a virtual machine can be found.
http://www.algonet.se/~dennisgr/z88.htm has a development kit named Z88DK, which is usable not only to create Z88 programs.
Rakewell still produces innovative hardware expansions.You can even buy a Z88 still there !