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We had a Sorcerer as the only computer at my school (in about 1980).

Not a very good machine. Tended to freeze, and we put a sticker on the top of the case saying "hit here to unfreeze".

The wierdest thing was the "bounce-free" keyboard. To prevent bouncing, the key registered on the up-stroke of the key rather than the down-stroke. That is, you pressed a key, nothing happened. Released the key, and the character was entered.

*Not* a good idea.

I remember it being the first Micro Computer in Austrailia with the top 128 Characters being programable. My Homebrew was a cross between a Trs-80/System 80 and Sorcerer. With a monitor program writen by myself and a friend and Basic copied/mod-ed from TRS-80 Remember the wiz.

The sorcerer II was my first non-mainframe computer. It totally used 8-track carts for the ROM packs. I don't remember it being terribly colorful, but that's probably because we had a mono monitor. I totally remember programming like mad in basic, and playing some of the games..

Is the Sorcerer really dead? I have kept my 4th Sorcerer packaged up for a number of years, and one of these days I shall start it up. It has a S100 Box, 2 Micropolis 16 hard sector drives 360Kb, 64K of memory and a modified 80x32 columns screen. It was the mightiest machine of the time before the arrival of the first XT, and besides the floppies being totally unreliable by Verbatim, my wife used to do thesis typing with an Olivetti daisywheel typewriter with the interface designed and built by me. his offered excelllent pages, miles better that the 8 dot dotmatrix printers of the time without lower case descendants. The lot cost me a fortune by todays standards, but thats all that was available.

I have a Sorcerer II but don't ever remember it having any colour capabilities, only the ability to define your own mono graphics characters. I also have the Video/Disk Unit.

They bought one of these at work (British Aerospace) back in 1980. I am sure that the ROM packs (seen on the right of the machine) were built into empty 8 track tape cartridges ! Was a colour version (or add on) available. I am sure that the reason work bought this was for its colour graphics (they already had a PET and Nascom which were both monochrome). I remember someone being sent out to buy a portable colour TV (costing £250, about the same as my monthly wage) to use with the Exidy. The arrival of this generated just as much interest as the arrival of the computer !