Jupiter Ace

The Jupiter Ace was a British home computer made by Jupiter Cantab and released in 1982, going on sale on 22 September of that year at 89.95 pounds. Like many home computers of its time it used the Zilog Z80 microprocessor, and it looked much like the ZX Spectrum, but it was set apart by an 8 kilobyte ROM holding the Forth language instead of BASIC. It had a tile-based monochrome display, simple speaker sound and cassette storage at 1500 baud. Forth was powerful but hard to learn, software was scarce, and the machine failed to find a market, with about 5,000 sold before Jupiter Cantab stopped trading by the end of October 1983. Remaining stock was sold by mail order after Boldfield Computing acquired the brand in 1984, and surviving machines are now collector items.