LNW company name came from its three founders' names: Gene Lu, Michael G. Norton (President) and Ken Woog. In 1980, the company started manufacturing expansion and interface cards for the Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 and then sold the first TRS-80 compatible single-board kit.
The LNW-80 was an early TRS-80 clone system, sold as a kit or assembled, and fully hardware and software compatible. It was a powerful machine offering much more advanced features than the original Model 1, including most features found on the TRS-80 expansion interface:
- Two selectable speeds, 1.77 Mhz (Tandy original) and 4 Mhz.
- 8 colours, 480 x 192 high resolution graphics
- RGB and monochrome monitor outputs
- Expanded keyboard with numeric keypad
- Versatile floppy disk controler for single/double sided 5.25" or 8" disks, single or double density format
- Serial RS-232C and Parallel interfaces.
Later, LNW sold two other computers, the LN80 II and the LN80 TEAM, a MS-DOS based system (no info at the moment).
In 1984 the company went bankrupt mainly because of its warehouse burglary, as all of its computers stock disapeared!
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.).
NAME
LNW-80
MANUFACTURER
LNW Research
TYPE
Home Computer
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
1982
END OF PRODUCTION
1984
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
Microsoft Basic Level II
KEYBOARD
Full-stroke 74 keys with numeric keypad
CPU
Z-80A
SPEED
1.77 Mhz. or 4 Mhz.
RAM
48 KB
VRAM
16 KB
ROM
12 KB
TEXT MODES
32 or 64 chars. x 16 lines
GRAPHIC MODES
4 modes from 64 x 48 to 480 x 192 pixels
COLORS
8 colours
SOUND
Buit-in speaker. Tones generator
SIZE / WEIGHT
42 (W) x 56(D) x 9(H) cm. Weight: 13 Kg
I/O PORTS
F.D. unit, RGB, Parallel, Serial RS-232, Tape recorder.
