1988- Cambridge Z88
Amstrad bought the rights to use the Sinclair name on computer products. However, while Sir Clive Sinclair (the creator of the ZX 80, ZX 81, ZX Spectrum and QL) retained ownership of Sinclair Research, he couldn't use the Sinclair name. Sir Sinclair therefore created a new company called Cambridge Research, with the intention of realizing an old project, the Pandora Project. The result of this work was the Z88 (it was achieved in 1988). Sir Sinclair at the time thought it was a revolution and said that this computer would be one of the best commercial successes. Actually it was Clive Sinclair's last contribution to the computer world!
This small machine was quite powerful; its operating system could exceed the 64 KB limitation of the Z80 with a good memory manager. It could also divide the memory into 16 KB pages, so the RAM could be expanded up to 3 MB thanks to 2 expansion ports. RAM cartridges of 32 KB and 128 KB were available. It had a built-in EPROM programmer available on the 3rd expansion port, so data could be saved directly on 128 KB EPROMs.
The ROM contained a lot of software: Pipedream (spreadsheet, word processor and database), the Z80 version of the BBC Basic (the Basic of the BBC or Electron), a diary, a calendar, a clock, a conversion tool, a VT 52 terminal emulator, Filer (the file manager of the Operating System) and a utility to transfer data to a PC compatible via a RS232 link. This transfer utility exported text and spreadsheet files into Wordstar or Lotus 1-2-3 formats.
It's probably worth pointing out that BBC basic built into the Z88 also contains a machine code editor, which allows you to embed Z80 assembly language into your Z88 BBC Basic programs! This feature was used quite often for the 'extra speed' portions of programs. Of course, having the assembly language embedded inside your source code meant that the code was very portable, and all loaded in one go - no messy 'support files' for your application.
Jan M.L. Bosmans reported to us that the BBC Basic in the Z88, although very powerful, lacks an essential feature: there is neither an editor nor debugger! This means that mistakes in a line can only be corrected by typing the whole line again. While it's true that the BBC basic had no editor built in, but one of the first 'type in programs' in the BASIC section of the manual was a program you could enter (and save to battery backed memory) that provided a line editor feature! It was just a few lines of BBC Basic, and worked very well.
