kogan5@walt.cc.utexas.edu (Robert George) (09/10/89)
Hello all,
Does anyone remember hearing about a machine called the Jupiter Ace?
It was about the size of a TS1000 and ran Forth as its main language. I think
I saw ads for it in Creative Computing around 1984 (they only ran for about 3
months). Anyone have the specs on this thing or know what happened to it?
Bob George kogan5@walt.cc.utexas.edu
The Indefinite Man
"Time has little to do with infinity and jelly doughnuts." - Mac's ghostA-PIRARD@BLIULG11.BITNET (Andr'e PIRARD) (09/11/89)
> Does anyone remember hearing about a machine called the Jupiter Ace?
It was in fact one of those home computers made by Sinclair, England.
I think the machine model the Ace used was what they called there the ZX-80.
I recall these computers were sold in the States by Timex, possibly
under another model name.
Somebody replaced the ROM to provide Forth instead of Sinclair's Basic.
Z80, 16Kb I think, rubber pad keyboard, 25*40 B/W video output.
It disappeared since Sinclair released an enhanced model with colour.
The good old days.
Andr .cjmchale@cs.tcd.ie (Ciaran McHale) (09/11/89)
In article <18198@ut-emx.UUCP> kogan5@walt.cc.utexas.edu (Robert George) writes: >Hello all, > Does anyone remember hearing about a machine called the Jupiter Ace? >It was about the size of a TS1000 and ran Forth as its main language. I think >I saw ads for it in Creative Computing around 1984 (they only ran for about 3 >months). Anyone have the specs on this thing or know what happened to it? > Bob George kogan5@walt.cc.utexas.edu > The Indefinite Man > "Time has little to do with infinity and jelly doughnuts." - Mac's ghost Yup, I have one at home. The history of the Ace is as follows: Some people who were involved in the design of the Sinclair ZX81 and Spectrum ( as they were known in the UK - I think that the TS1000 is the name that the Spectrum was reseased under in the USA ) set up their own company called Jupiter Cantab ( or something like that ). They released the Jupiter Ace which had the following specs: Z80 CPU running at about 4MHz. 3K of inbuilt RAM. This was spilt up into (approx) 0.75K for the byte mapped screen (32 cols by 24 lines) 1K for the character set. All 128 chars could be redefined A few hundred bytes for the system variables. The rest ( 1k ) available for the user's dictionary. It was possible to buy a 16 or 48 RAM pack to extend the memory. The ROM was 8k. The FORTH was a non-standard version. It was the only FORTH that I've ever used so I couldn't tell you exectly what the differences are. There was no concept of "screens". All save/load operations were to a standard cassette recorder in a similar manner to the Spectrum. The keyboard was a rubber pad similar but worse (!) than the Spectrum's. It was ( to my knowledge ) the only home machine with FORTH as the built in language. It failed in the UK and USA markets and Jupiter Cantab sold it's stock to a company called "Boldfield Computing limited" in England. Boldfield Ltd continued to support the Ace for a year or two. I bought mine from them for next to nothing ( 40 pounds incl. the 16K RAM ). Some software was brought out such as an assembler/disassembler, games, spreadsheet (!). Eventually Boldfield decided to stop supporting the ACE. Everybody on their mailing list was told that the remaining bulk stock, the distribution rights, copyrights of the ROM code etc were up for sale. I've no idea if any company decided to take up this offer so I don't know if it's still supported. If you want, I should have Boldfield's address at home - you could ask them for details on the Ace's fate. When Boldfield were stopping support on the Ace they had a sale. I bought a "lucky dip bag" for about 5 pounds. In it I got, among other things, about 3 spare copies of the user manual. If anybody wants a copy then email me, rather than post to the net. First come first served. The only charge will be the price of an enveolpe and a stamp. To save people asking ... "No, I don't want to sell my Ace." I'd prefer to keep it for the antique status it will have in 20 years. CJ. P.S. I'm going away on 2 weeks holidays soon so there might be a delay in response to any email I get. ----- If email to the adress in the header bounces then try ... cjmchale@csvax1.tcd.ie dpmkelly.cs.tcd.ie "All things take time - but in the end time takes everything" Felix de Bod.
mahler@latcs1.oz (Daniel Mahler) (09/12/89)
I thought it disappeared because the company went bust. Are you sure it was made by sinclair? Has anything like it been made since. (i.e. spartan, el cheapo with something like forth to make the most of it)
A-PIRARD@BLIULG11.BITNET (Andr'e PIRARD) (09/12/89)
>I thought it disappeared because the company went bust. They probably did by now. But the ZX-80 was obsolete much before that. Later, Sinclair (UK) made the ZX-Spectrum (the most successful model with colour) then the QL (with a 68008 and 100K tiny tapes drives afterwards). >Are you sure it was made by sinclair? Pretty sure. The case was exactly the ZX-80's, with no more room than to fit Sinclair's PLAs. As to whether they were resold from Sinclair, built under licence or else, I don't know. Sorry it's long ago, but my memory seems to tell me ROMs were also sold separately for replacement on a genuine ZX-80. >Has anything like it been made since. Don't know. It looks like this kind of hardware died ever since CBM 64/Atari ST/Amiga defined the bottom level of the market. Yes, a pity for some hackers. Last time I saw a ZX-80, it was sold $20 (second hand). But remember it only used cassettes. And a colleague here lately bought a CP/M machine with 2 disk drives for $70... Andr'e.
wmb@SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley) (09/12/89)
The Forth implementation in the Jupiter ACE was really quite nice. It was based on Forth-79 with a few differences. Most notably, it didn't save source code to mass storage. Instead, it had a decompiler that would "pretty-print" the reconstructed source code into a buffer, where you could edit it, then you could compile the edit buffer. Another nice feature was the ability to replace the implentation of any word. If you typed, for instance, REDEFINE FOO , it would remove the old word FOO from the dictionary (the whole show was relocatable, so it could do that), then it would change all references to the old word FOO to instead refer to the most recent word in the dictionary. This decompiler, in conjunction with the ability to SAVE and LOAD the dictionary image to cassette, took the place of source code and screens. It also had some floating point words: F+ F- F* F/ F. FNEGATE INT UFLOAT . There were a few other minor differences from Forth-79, not profound enough to detail here. Mitch
karl@ficc.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) (09/13/89)
> > Does anyone remember hearing about a machine called the Jupiter Ace?
Yeah, I still have one. It has a Z80 and some small number of K of RAM.
It cost about $150. A serial port was another $100. It had a cassette
interface for loading and saving programs, a 25X40 or so display (as another
user remarked) and chiclet keys. I fooled around with it for a few days
but found it to be too braindead to do anything serious with.
One thing I hadn't seen before at that time, it had a couple of words,
FAST and SLOW. SLOW, I believe, replaced the inner interpreter with
one that performed some integrity checks, like checking stack boundaries,
which was useful.
--
-- uunet!ficc!karl "Have you debugged your wolf today?"dbell@maths.tcd.ie (Derek Bell) (09/14/89)
In article <8909111325.AA15624@jade.berkeley.edu> Forth Interest Group International List <FIGI-L%SCFVM.bitnet@jade.berkeley.edu> writes: }> Does anyone remember hearing about a machine called the Jupiter Ace? } }It was in fact one of those home computers made by Sinclair, England. }I think the machine model the Ace used was what they called there the ZX-80. Nope, the Ace was made by ex-Sinclair engineers, but working independenty. ( As Ace Cantab, I think). The ZX-80, ZX-81 & ZX Spectrum were all Sinclair machines. I think the Ace was (very loosely) based on the Spectrum (a colour machine). (There were a couple of decent Forths for the Speccy.) }The good old days. Ah yes, the Spectrum had the grand total of eight colours, (Oh my! :-)) sixteen if you counted the bright versions. (Anybody know of a mailing-list for owners of these? Don't laugh!) }Andr . -- dbell@maths.tcd.ie | Derek Bell To everyone is given the key to heaven, the same key opens the gates of hell -- Ancient proverb
sdh@flash.bellcore.com (Stephen D Hawley) (02/02/90)
A friend of mine has a Timex/Sinclair that he is trying to use to decode the AP newswire with (from a shortwave signal). He is having trouble interfacing to the radio becasue of the speed of basic, and doesn't know z-80 very well. The question is: Is it possible for him to get the Jupiter ace ROMs so he can do this in FORTH (seems better suited to it)? Replies by mail, please. Steve Hawley sdh@flash.bellcore.com A noun's a special kind of word. It's ev'ry name you ever heard. I find it quite interesting, A noun's a person place or thing.