MicroBee

The MicroBee, also written Micro Bee, was a series of networkable Z80-based home computers designed in Australia and sold by Applied Technology, a company that became the publicly listed MicroBee Systems Limited soon after the first machine appeared. The design team included Owen Hill and Matthew Starr. It first reached the public as a kit whose assembly instructions were published in the magazine Your Computer in February 1982, and was then repackaged as a pre-built two-tone beige and black machine after a successful bid for the New South Wales Department of Education computer tender. The original layout used two boards: a baseboard holding almost everything except memory, and a core board above it carrying the battery-backed memory and the ROM. Its most distinctive features were a user configurable video display, which could be set up to imitate the screens of other computers, and non-volatile RAM that let the machine be switched off, carried away and switched on again with its program or document intact. The original machines ran at 2 MHz, stored programs on cassette, and used a BASIC interpreter written by Matthew Starr. Later models raised the clock speed and the screen width, and two local networks, BeeNet and StarNet, were offered. About 70,000 machines were built before the company ceased trading in 1992, and the brand was revived in 2012.