In 1979 the British magazine Wireless World published the technical details for a "Scientific Computer". Year 1979 ( MCMLXXIX) was a Common year starting on Monday (link displays the 1979 Gregorian calendar) Wireless World was the pre-eminent British Magazine for Radio and Electronics enthusiasts Shortly afterward the British firm Powertran used this design for their implementation, which they called the PSI Comp 80. It was sold in the form of a kit of parts for a cased single-board home computer system. An electronic Kit is a package of Electrical components used to build an electronic device. Single-board computers ( SBCs) are complete Computers built on a single Circuit board.
The system was based on a Z80 Microprocessor addressing a mixture of 8 kB of system RAM and EPROM, plus 2 kB of Video RAM. The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit Microprocessor designed and sold by Zilog from July 1976 onwards A kilobyte (derived from the SI prefix Kilo -, meaning 1000 is a unit of Information or Computer storage equal to either 1024
It used a National Semiconductor MM57109 as a mathematical co-processor to speed up calculations.
The monochrome Video Display Controller could simultaneously display combinations of 32 lines of 64 characters, and 128 x 64 resolution graphics by either displaying a normal character or a "pseudo graphics" character, with pixel blocks in a 2x2 matrix. A Video Display Controller or VDC is an Integrated circuit which is the main component in a Video signal generator, a device responsible for the production A technique similar to the one used in the TRS-80 - It could later be expanded to a higher resolution, although never to colour. TRS-80 was Tandy Corporation 's desktop Microcomputer model line sold through Tandy's Radio Shack stores in the late 1970s and early
Ahead of its time, it incorporated a number crunching coprocessor and a novel language embedded in EPROM called Basic Using Reverse Polish - BURP.
Add-ons were developed for the system, including memory expansions, floppy and hard disk interfaces, various software packages and a disk operating system, SCIDOS, which was CP/M-compatible but also included features - structured (pathed) disk folders, etc. - now very familiar to modern-day PC users.
During the mid-1980s the designer of this system, John Adams, published a new version of the Scientific Computer - the SC84 (Scientific Computer of 1984). It was based upon a backplane and plug-in cards and modules and featuring a Hitachi HD64180 processor, up to 512kbytes of RAM and a high resolution colour graphics system.
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