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IMSAI Series Two
Dino writes "You can actually pre-order a new IMSAI here. These folks bought the rights to produce the IMSAI in the late seventies, and provided the unit used in Wargames. It has a genuine S100 bus, but also has modern features as well, the most interesting being a driver that will allow you to access an ATX motherboard via the parallel port as a disk drive."
I see that they're offering it for a kilobuck...remember when that was the price of a 64K Ithaca Intersystems S100 bus RAM card kit?
...I think Z-System, a CP/M-compatible operating system for Z80's that was made in the '80s, could indeed handle as much RAM as you'd managed to make the system address. I ran it on a TRS-80 Model 4 that had a processor upgrade card on it that used a HD64180, a relative of the Z180, and 384K of RAM. Hey, you laugh, but for a while I ran a BBS on it--since I could load the entire OS, BBS software and database indexes for 800+ messages into RAM, it ran faster than a lot of the PC BBS's of the day.
The "new IMSAI" looks like a machine I'd have loved about a decade ago, back when some ex-CP/M hackers had designed a Z180-based Z-System machine on a Baby-AT motherboard that used the XT bus. As I recall the official name was the "PC-Z" but they referred to it informally as the "Grudge." (Which of course led to someone suggest they should make a portable version and call it the "Pet Peeve.")
No, as fond as I am of reminiscing, I don't think I'll buy a new IMSAI, in case anyone asks. If I ever miss the old days, I break out a TRS-80 emulator, play a few rounds of an arcade game in its glorious 128x48 resolution, and remember that even if people pushed hardware to the limit those days in a way that they don't now, that doesn't mean it'd be much fun to go back.
You get a nice built in keyboard, an lcd display,
and it'll sync up to your real computer.
From there you can program your Z80 in assy, C, or basic. Heck, you can even download a basic interpretter onto your little palm-top/pda.
Experience the joys of accessing memory, indirectly indexing, and jumping back and forth.
And save $900 in the process!
So yeah, this is cute, but as dumb as a box of rocks. You can get those microprocessor notebook-style trainers for a couple of hundred bucks (check mouser.com ), not 9!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.