The Microbee computers were popular in Australia where they equipped many schools. But these computers also sold well in Scandinavia or Sweden for example.
The Microbee 128 and its extended version, the Premium series, were housed in the same case as the Microbee 32 but had four additional cursor keys. they shipped with a 5.25" or 3.5" single or double disk drives unit.
Both 128 and Premium versions boasted improved graphics over the earlier machines, colour as standard and many other detailed improvements. They ran CP/M operating system. The Premium had an IBM CGA compatible video interface and dual density floppy drives, offering 776 KB capacity instead of 386 KB for the 128. a 10 MB hard disk was also available.
Please consider donating your old computer / videogame system to Old-Computers.com or one of our partners from anywhere in the world (Europe, America, Asia, etc.).
Special thanks to Norm Poulter from Australia who donated us this computer !
Being equipped with a Z80 CPU, these "128K" units could only access 64KB for programs and data. The other 64KB was set aside as a RAM drive. The RAM drive wasn''t all that useful though, because (unlike their 32 and 64K models) they used DRAM not SRAM, so the RAM drive data was gone once the computer was switched off.
Sunday 29th November 2015
Michael Otway (Australia)
Heh, Kung Fury gets hacked back in time on one of these. :D
Friday 29th May 2015
Charles Thomas
The Network you describe was very popular in schools here in Australia also. It was called StarNet, and in it's most common configuration could support up to 30 or so client machines. It was a 19,200 baud serial network, the client machines having "StarNet Adapters" while the server was generally a 56k disk system model with a "StarNetwork Multiplexer". Software would be loaded on the server, then "pushed" through the serial link to the client computers and run from their RAM. Some units would have a "battery" switch so you could plug in, load software, then unplug and keep it in memory while you moved the machine elsewhere.
Special thanks to Norm Poulter from Australia who donated us this computer !
