The Compucolor 8001 (1976) | Hacker News Reader

The Compucolor 8001 (1976)

oldcomputers.net

36 pointsapi6 comments

I was 16 years old and working in Seattle's Retail Computer Store when this device came out.

The store sold products from Altair, IMSAI, Processor Technology, and a couple of other companies.

I was thoroughly familiar with the 4K and 8K versions of Altair Basic and was surprised to find that the Compucolor's implementation had the same quirks and bugs yet claimed to be written by someone named Charles Muench.

One day Bill Gates (I swear) wandered in to the store and I showed him what I had found. He typed a couple of commands (maniacally fast, as I recall) and verified that the Compucolor Basic was actually Altair Basic in disguise.

My dad bought one of these when I was a wee young-un. One cool thing about them is you could use the arrow keys and the 8 color keys to draw lo-res pictures on the screen. IIRC it had an interesting graphics mode where cells could be either characters or patterns. And because the CRT was directly wired and didn't have to go through a TV modulator it had the most saturated reds you'd see outside of an arcade for awhile.

And that metal behemoth of a keyboard! And loading BASIC programs off the 8-track! Fortunately we upgraded to an Apple ][+ a few years later :)

Ha. I had a Compucolor II. It got me into programming because there were no games so I had to write my own. My parents didn't replace it until about 1990!

It didn't gave the drawing mode you mention, but u did actually write a program that did exactly that. It also had a print function - only worked with the Epsom dot-matrix printer we had, as I used a special control mode. Basically a character was an 8x8 array of dots drawn one column at a time by the print head. You could manually control the print head though by putting the printer into a special mode through escape codes, and then just sending binary 8-bit numbers to encode pubs you wanted to print for each column.

Thinking back I can't believe I made it work - I was only about 10 at the time. I do remember facing to stick my nose in the printer's manual for a long time. Of course printers had manuals then, not like today...

There's a good online emulator of the CII here: http://compucolor.org/emu.html

Oh cool! I actually have one of those keyboards in my basement! I've been wondering what it was for years!

Please send it to the EEVblog for a tear-down. Or, of course, gently do one yourself, and post here.

I'd love to see how those optically encoded keyboard keys work, I've never heard of that technology before! :)

That's a great idea! I'll do that.

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