• 1982

Hardware Description

The original MicroBee computer was designed in Australia by a team including Owen Hill and Matthew Starr. It was based on features available on the DG-Z80 and DG-640 S-100 cards developed by David Griffiths, TCT-PCG S-100 card developed by TCT Micro Design and MW6545 S-100 card developed by Dr John Wilmshurst. It was originally packaged as a two board unit, with the lower "main board" containing the keyboard, Zilog Z80 microprocessor, Synertek 6545 CRT controller, 2 kB of "screen" RAM, 2 kB of character ROM (128 characters) and 2 kB of Programmable Character Graphics (PCG) RAM (128 characters). Each byte in the screen RAM addressed a character in either the character ROM or PCG RAM. A second board, termed the "core board", contained the memory, and on later models also included a floppy disk controller.