Early in September 2019 while on holidays in London I had a couple of free days available and decided to head north to Cambridge to visit the Centre for Computing History which was having an event day.
Hidden away in an industrial estate this unassuming warehouse with a faded beige roof soon had an overflowing car park and a growing crowd all waiting for the doors to open.
While at the museum I purchased a couple of items from their store, but one item I really wanted was the MyZ80 computer kit but unfortunately it was out of stock. But I was assured by the team that these would be back in stock so I was happy to wait until I got back home and to place an order.
Fast forward six months, the world went into lock down and I thought that this would be a good time to grab the MyZ80 kit and to build my very own computer with BASIC on a ROM.
The kit came with all the components that would be needed to build a Z80 computer that ran NASCOM 1979 BASIC (Microsoft 80 BASIC) and a serial connection cable to talk to it from my Mac.
The kit took about an hour to build, and after some minor troubleshooting (poor solder join) the Z80 was plugged into the serial connector and started.
After powering on the Z80 and pressing the reset switch the computer was up and running, prompting me for a Cold or Warm start (cold = clear memory, Warm = keep BASIC code in memory) and then entering through the Memory top.
Now the Z80 (RC2014 mini) doesn’t come with any storage device so you either have to type in a BASIC program character by character in the terminal window or for the purpose of testing I opted for copy and paste from some examples in the manual.
So what can you do with a computer that behaves like it from 1979? Well the primary goal is to have fun, just like we all did in 1979. By programming in BASIC, creating entertaining little games and sharing the content with everyone.