Hi from a Microbee owner

[ChickenMan]

Hi from Oz also. I have just had my Premium Microbee upgraded to the new Microbee Premium Plus+ with booting from an SD card or real disks. A very versatile unit, can also boot into uCLinux. Has anyone in NZ acquired one of these new Microbees?

Microbees were sold to schools and generally in NZ back in the 80's but there is little mention here of people actually using/having one. I have no idea how many made their way to NZ but I'm am aware there was an active Microbee Users Group back then. Were any members here involved in that User Group ?

Looks like a well run Forum here, congratulations to all thats involved in its running. (I'm from the MSPP in Oz). Many thanks for the scans of the Bits & Bytes as I have found many Microbee articles in them. I hope the scanning will continue

Cheers,
Alan

[tezza]

Hi Alan, and welcome to the forums.

I certainly remember a few Microbee ads around in NZ mags but I never saw one or touched one, or knew anyone who owned one? I'm sure there was a small clandestine community here somewhere though

Thanks for the kind words about the forums and the B&B scans. I do intend to do more of the latter at some stage.

[acsi]

Hi Alan,

Welcome.

The Microbee was never a machine I owned myself but a friend of mine in Brisbane had one or two of them. 128k from memory with a GUI. He wound up hooking up an old (and dead to my machine at least) Atari ST keyboard to it as well. Used to hook up to the local BBS's. A very powerful machine from memory and is what has inspired me to checkout CP/M a bit more than I have in the past. (Still got to get on with that as I now have two CP/M capable machines to play with, Spectrum +3 and an Amstrad 6128)

Mike

[ChickenMan]

Yes the later Microbees were pretty powerful machines in their days. Easy to use with their Graphical Shell, etc. with ZCPR 2 version of CP/M. There is an un-official CP/M ver 3 for the Microbee as well. Pity the cheap Taiwanese IBM clones killed off all the non-msdos 8/16bit PC's of the day.

Arr the Amstrad 6128. A friend at the time had one of those and with the non-standard 3" (not 3.5") floppies he was unable to get a lot of software. I remember he was desperate for Wordstar 4 at the time but was simply unavailable for the Amstrad. So I took my Microbee into work, he his 6128, a bit of telephone wire and a couple of serial plugs and transferred it from my 'Bee to his Amstrad at 300baud. The 'Bee could transfer as high at 19kbaud but the link was limited to what he could get to run on the Amstrad at the time, ie 300. Took about 7 hours !! but he was over the moon

He then bought a 5.25" Floppy external drive for the 6128 and I ended up working out the Amstrad floppy disk format and added the data to Setdisk. I was then able to read/write and even format his 5.25" Amstrad disks in my Microbee. All good fun in the mid 80's

Alan