"Roger Long" wrote in
:

Anybody remember the Sinclair Z80? That was my first computer. A
Basic loop to count 1,2,3.... would go slower than you could say the
number out loud.

--
Roger Long





Z80's good....especially running CP/M OS....(c;

I was an Ohio Scientific microcomputer dealer. OSI had the first hard
drive micro, a 74MB (MB not GB) fixed hard drive stolen out of
minicomputers. It had a 14" platter and was mounted in the Model 3's
standard 18" equipment rack. There were 3 processors you could switch
between very easily. A 6502, Z80 and 6800 (not 68000). OS-65/U was the
companies OS to run on the 6502, a great little processor, and it came
with a very extended BASIC interpreter making software fun to write.

We wrote an accounting system to keep track of a few thousand vending
machines/jukeboxes, etc., for Sumter Music and Amusements in our town.
The system was the 74MB computer under OS-65/U with our BASIC program
running on it. The box used dumb terminals and we had 4 cards in it
with 4 ADDS Regent 24 dumb terminals on various desks in their office.
They were thrilled that such a cheap system could do what it cost, at
that time, hundreds of thousands of dollars to do on an expensive
minicomputer. It ran for years 24/7 off a commercial UPS we installed
for it. Crashing on power glitches wasn't pretty! It usually took out
the database. Backup was in 8" floppies each week and we handled that
for them after hours. Dick or I would go down at night and take the
backup with us in case the building burned we'd still have the whole
database, only updating what had been done between the backup and the
fire, which never happened. The UPS failed once, but we got lucky and
noone was writing to the hard drive when the crash occurred. We went
way, way past the noted MTBF. OSI couldn't believe how long it ran....
(c;

IBM came out with the PC and that was the end of OSI and our little
computer store. My biggest sale was to Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co in
North Carolina. They wanted to break their people into microcomputers
and funded a whole school with 36 OSI desktop computers in the training
room. Those used little NTSC video monitors as output and had two
floppy drives and a keyboard in a pre-Apple 1 small computer that
actually worked. Their IT boss was a fan of OSI and used to send us
some really neat software he wrote on them to play with on ours.

The PC just put everyone out of business....almost Apple, too!

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The Maemo Linux hackers have written or ported many old small computer
emulators to the tablet's Linux OS. There may be one for the Sinclair.
There's one for the old TI handhelds, I know.