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+--- Thread: I'm Gerald and back in the 1980s I had several Microbees. (/thread-18.html)
I'm Gerald and back in the 1980s I had several Microbees. - geraldew - 10-11-2019
I'm Gerald and back in the 1980s I had several Microbees.
I initially bought the 56k CMOS model with floppy drive (or two, maybe it was two from the get-go). I later replaced that a 128k dual floppy model and then added a second 128k model so as to have two. I had a 1200/75 baud BeeModem and was a user of several dial-up bulletin boards.
I bought Turbo Pascal and did a lot of hobby programming with that. I remember writing a step-wise lookalike to Hoards of the Deep Realm and a system of virtual display windows. I must have had some access to a ROM burner because I wrote myself a font editor and replaced the built-in font ROM with something that I found easier to read. I seem to recall doing some similar hack to change the default 80x24 terminal routines to do 80x25 when I realised there were enough bytes in the screen memory to allow it. I never used an assembler, I would just work directly with the Z80 op codes - even after all these years C3 for a jump and C9 for a call is still burnt into my brain. By now I don't recall at what point I dispensed with my Microbees or even how I did so.
These days I'm a data analyst living in Melbourne but back then I was a Microbee employee in the Perth office doing repairs and sales. It was local, as I lived just around the corner. Some of my other duties were installing Microbees into various high schools (including the star network), doing promotional expos (city and country) and adapting some of the Swedish software for local use. I left the company near the end of 1985 to take another shot at university. At some point I think I copied my CP/M floppies to a CD-ROM so I assume I still have that somewhere or other.
Despite my hardware background - I'd made a graphic equaliser from a JayCar kit in the 1970s and in the early 1980s had assembled 1000-gain amplifiers for the gravity wave project at the University of W.A. - after Microbee I never tinkered with hardware in computers much. I think at some point I just decided to be a software-only type of person.
Similarly I later chose to never become a professional programmer and moved into data "scripting" instead. While these days I work in SQL and Hadoop+Spark I got my initial data kick from using dBaseII on the Microbee and playing with b-tree index programs in Turbo Pascal.
RE: I'm Gerald and back in the 1980s I had several Microbees. - ChickenMan - 11-11-2019
"At some point I think I copied my CP/M floppies to a CD-ROM so I assume I still have that somewhere or other."
Hi Gerald and welcome to the forum
. We would be most interested in a copy of your CD if you can find it as we are trying to archive everything Microbee before it all ends up evaporating and lost with time.
RE: I'm Gerald and back in the 1980s I had several Microbees. - someone - 20-11-2019
Welcome aboard Gerald!
You history with the microbee is fascinating.
Making your own microbee font ROM is fun!
Did you know that there were some Turbo Pascal graphics libraries for the original Microbee?
They made it easy to program graphics on a microbee.
Don't bash yourself too much with your scripts!
Cheers and enjoy this forum
Someone