Have You Ever Heard Of The Lobo MAX-80?

November 10, 2026 by Donald Papp 7 Comments

[Adrian Black]’s enthusiasm is palpable as he shows off something truly unusual: a Lobo MAX-80 computer from 1982. To call this machine rare would be an understatement, as the company folded soon after its release. The one shown here is the first one [Adrian] has ever seen, never mind that he had never even heard of it before.

The MAX-80 was a Z80-based computer that was CP/M and LDOS compatible. As [Adrian] puts it, many companies and innovative products came and went during this time period. There was so much, and most of it has simply disappeared.

He was able to find information about the Lobo MAX-80 from advertisements, media coverage, reviews, and more (and he has thoughtfully uploaded everything, see the video description for links) and even pieced together a short history of a company that got its start making TRS-80 and Apple II disk drives before transitioning to producing their own machine. The MAX-80 was released in 1982, but sadly the company didn’t last much longer.

After sharing what history he was able to dig up, [Adrian] opens the unit he has and goes through diagnostics. It’s actually in remarkably good shape, and he’s eventually able to get it to actually boot into CP/M.

There’s still more work needed before he can put it through its paces, but getting a formerly completely unknown machine from the 80s operational is pretty wild. Watch the whole thing in the video below.

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A Labour Of Love Brings A Kids Book To The Spectrum

July 27, 2026 by Jenny List 37 Comments

Back in the early 1980s when 8-bit home computers became affordable educational toys for children, the traditional paper publishing industry did its best to keep up. For a few brief years, there were children’s books dedicated to the innards of a computer in meticulous detail, and courtesy of [Jason Jacques] we have a chance to look at one of the lesser-known ones.

The British publisher Ladybird made a series of four computer books, and while the first three had content for both the Sinclair Spectrum and the BBC Micro, the last in the series only featured the BBC. [Jason] took that book and re-imagined the missing Sinclair Spectrum version.

The surprise is how deep it dives into the architecture of an 8-bit computer, and it’s refreshing to see something that’s not unduly dumbed-down for kids. We’re guessing that this would have appealed to the 5% of kids who ran with their computers rather than just playing Jet Set Willy back then, and we’re sure a few grown-up 50-somethings may remember it or books like it.

If you think you may have seen Ladybird books here before, it may be because we reviewed another influential tech book of theirs for kids. Meanwhile you can take a look at the contemporary computer books from their arch-rival Usborne.

The Email Of The Future In 1986

May 24, 2026 by Jenny List 26 Comments

With so many online messaging services to choose from it’s almost as though the daddy of them all, email, has faded into the background as something you only use for more formal contacts. But it’s still the underpinning of much of the business world’s electronic communication and is likely to stay so for the foreseeable future. The BBC Archive takes us back to a time when email was relatively new, when in 1986 [Lesley Judd] takes a very chunky 1980s laptop on a plane from London to the Netherlands, and sends an email to her colleague at home using a payphone and an acoustic coupler.

There are so many of-their-era quirks in this film it’s difficult to pick, but little things like the aircraft still having smoking and non-smoking areas, there being no sign of a mobile telephone, or the payphone operating in Guilders rather than Euros make it from a different time. Perhaps most interesting though is the email system in use, because this isn’t an internet based service. Instead it’s using Telecom Gold, which was the UK telco BT’s online service offering to businesses, and part of the international Dialcom network. This was a commercial service which hung on until some time in the 1990s when the Internet finally displaced it.

The British writer L. P. Hartley used the phrase “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” as the opening sentence of one of his books, and the film below the break certainly brings that to mind. It’s a time that’s within reach, yet the changes in information technology over even the next decade or so would make the tech depicted not just obsolete but almost unrecognizable. Most of us today could sit at a 1996 laptop and send an email, but few of us would be as immediately at home with Telecom Gold.

It’s still possible to use an acoustic coupler today though.

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Remembering The BBC Computer Literacy Project

May 9, 2026 by Jenny List 15 Comments

There comes a point in everybody’s life when things that they were a part of are presented as history, and for the 8-bit generation, that time is now. It’s interesting to see the early history of 8-bit home computers presented as history, not from a 2026 perspective but from the early 1990s. The BBC archive has recently posted a retrospective from 1992 looking at ten years of the Computer Literacy Project, a British government programme intended to equip the young people of the 1980s with the skills they would need to approach the information age. It’s a much more immediate history of something which was largely still in place at the time, making it a time capsule in which this past isn’t quite the other country we see it as today.

The Computer Literacy Project was run by the nation’s broadcaster and included a raft of TV programming about computers, as well as the commissioning of a machine specifically for the project. You know this machine as the Acorn BBC Micro, and aside from eventually providing the genesis of what would become ARM, it remains one of the most high-spec 8-bit machines in terms of built-in hardware. We hear from the luminaries of Acorn about the development of this machine, and then the film moves into some of the wider cultural effects.

If you were there, you’ll doubtless remember some of the TV programmes featured, and you might have used a BBC Micro at school. If you weren’t there, it’s an encapsulation of the promise on offer in that era, an optimism that seems sad when you reflect that educational computing descended into learning Microsoft Word during the following decade. It would be another two decades before the Raspberry Pi and BBC micro:bit picked up that fallen torch.

The Beeb, it seems, has long had an interest in home computers. Schools, too.

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Recreating A Homebrew Game System From 1987

October 29, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 11 Comments

We often take for granted how easy it is to get information in today’s modern, Internet-connected world. Especially around electronics projects, datasheets are generally a few clicks away, as are instructions for building almost anything. Not so in the late 80s where ordering physical catalogs of chips and their datasheets was generally required.

Mastering this landscape took a different skillset and far more determination than today, which is what makes the fact that a Japanese electronics hobbyist built a complete homebrew video game system from scratch in 1987 all the more impressive.[Alex] recently discovered this project and produced a replica of it with a few modern touches.

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Behind RadioShack’s Cheapest Computer

June 30, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 30 Comments

In the 1980s, there was a truly staggering amount of choice for a consumer looking to purchase a home computer. On the high end, something like an Apple Lisa, a business-class IBM PC, or a workstation from Sun Microsystems could easily range from $6,000 to $20,000 (not adjusted for inflation). For the time, these mind-blowing prices might have been worth the cost, but for those not willing to mortgage their homes for their computing needs, there were also some entry-level options. One of these was the Sinclair ZX-80, which was priced at an astounding $100, which caused RadioShack to have a bit of a panic and release this version of the TRS-80 computer to compete with it.

As [David] explains in his deep dive into this somewhat obscure machine, the TRS-80 MC-10 was a commercial failure, although not for want of features. It had a color display, a chicklet keyboard, and 4K of RAM, which were all things that the ZX-80 lacked.

Unfortunately, it also had a number of drawbacks compared to some of its other contemporaries that made consumers turn away. Other offerings by Commodore, Atari, Texas Instruments, and even RadioShack themselves were only marginally more expensive and had many more features, including larger memory and better storage and peripheral options, so most people chose these options instead.

The TRS-80 MC-10 is largely a relic of the saturated 80s home computer market. It’s drop in price to below $50, and the price competition between other PC manufacturers at the time was part of the reason for the video game crash of the 1980s, and even led to Steve Jobs getting fired from Apple. There’s not a huge retro scene for these machines either, although there is at least one game developer you can see in the video below from [Spriteworx]. If you want to experiment with some of the standard TRS-80 software, there are emulators that have everything you need.

Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip!

The Math Behind The Music Of The 80s

December 11, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 49 Comments

Although there might have been other music produced or recorded in the 1980s, we may never know of its existence due to the cacophony of all of the various keytars, drum machines, and other synthesized music playing nonstop throughout the decade. There was perhaps no more responsible synthesizer than the Yamaha DX7 either; it nearly single-handedly ushered in the synth pop era. There had been other ways of producing similar sounds before but none were as unique as this keyboard, and for ways beyond just its sound as [Kevin] describes in this write-up.

Part of the reason the DX7 was so revolutionary was that it was among the first accessible synthesizers that was fully digital, meaning could play more than one note at a time since expensive analog circuitry didn’t need to be replicated for multiple keys. But it also generated its tones by using frequency modulation of sine waves in a way that allowed many signals to be combined to form different sounds. While most popular musicians of the 80s used one of the preset sounds of the synthesizer, it could produce an incredible range of diverse sounds if the musician was willing to dig a bit into the programming of this unique instrument.

There were of course other reasons this synthesizer took off. It was incredibly robust, allowing a musician to reliably carry it from show to show without much worry, and it also stood on the shoulders of giants since musicians had been experimenting with various other types of synthesizers for the previous few decades. And perhaps it was at the right place and time for the culture as well. For a look at the goings on inside the chip that powered the device, [Ken Shirriff] did a deep dive into one a few years ago.