Announced in 1986;10.
Released in 1986;12.
Production stopped in 1987;2,
when Xyzzy realised this was a very silly computer.
Education,
Programming,
Business.
Apple Macintosh hardware compatibility.
MacOS.
Teletext standard.
SCSI standard.
MIDI standard.
Not too uncommon, though it was relatively expensive.
Depending on whom you ask, there were anywhere between
50000 and 150000 machines manufactured.
This is a fictional computer. It doesn't exist, although I based its entry on that of the
BBC Master 128 -- but very loosely! :-)
This is a second paragraph of trivia. If you like the Foobob
9000, I thoroughly recommend looking at the hardware produced by
Acorn.
Every now and then, the machine would fail to boot properly,
and it would come up with a Foo!
prompt. Some people
have claimed this is an easter egg. It is also said that, if you
typed Bar! within five seconds, the computer would blow
up its power supply. This has never been verified, as the keyboard
is so horrendously useless that it takes five seconds to press a
single key!
Z80 running at 2. 8 bits.
32 containing BASIC and the canonical list of elephant jokes. The BASIC was
a bit useless, as the joke list was somehow deemed more important and occupied most of
the ROM.
128, expandable up to 256 in steps of
64 by installing extra ram cards.
The case measures 58.5;5.0;45.0.
Medium plastic case, with hot pink keys and lots of cyan and green pastels.
Other than the disgustingly garish colour-scheme, the machine is pretty plain, without
LEDs or any other particularly interesting markings. The company ``forgot'' to put their
label on it, for obvious reasons -- who would want to be associated with a case like
this? It couldn't get worse if it had ``Hello Kitty'' written across the top.
There is a new, additional numeric keypad, but
the membrane keyboard was incredibly bad so it wouldn't have made any sense using it
as a business-oriented machine anyway.
Driven by the 6845. The machine had one
256;192;4 graphics mode and one
32x24;8 text mode. A total of 8
was available.
Uses the AY-3-8912 sound chip.
There were 3 channels of sound and
1 channel of white noise. 7
octaves. Stereo sound. The 8912 outputs the three channels
independently, and the machine outputs channels 1 and 2 through the left speaker and
channels 2 and 3 through the right one.
There are 16 levels of
volume. The sound chip can generate a total of 4096 different
pitches. The sound subsystem does not need CPU time in order to
produce sound.
One 5.25-inch floppy drive, holding 320. Up to two
drives can be connected, for a total of 640
This machine has pathetic I/O!
Joystick ports. This was a big
mistake, as there were no games for this machine, and no
joysticks were ever produced anyway.
RS-232 serial port.
RGB monitor port.