Hunting a unicorn
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The internet may not forget, but it can hardly remember something it almost never heard of. I'm looking for a computer that was described in Dr. Dobb's Journal (for those who remember what that was) and mentioned in another book about another computer. From these sources, I can pinpoint it to 1985 or earlier and that's about all the entire internet has to say about it so far. I don't even have any idea what it looked like. It must have been some sort of portable computer with internal NiCd batteries. It had some sort of LCD display for 8 lines of 40 characters, a 1200 baud modem and 64k - 256k RAM. Dimensions and weight were described as 11 by 13 by 3 1/8 inches and 12.8 pounds. It also had two interchangable processor boards, one with a CMOS Z80 and the other with a (also CMOS) CDP1805. As a CMOS system, it got a decent battery life of 12 - 80 hours out of its NiCd batteries, depending of how much use you made of the display. It was called the UDI-500 and must have been an expensive toy for managers. Does anyone have more information or even heard of it? It's like a missing relative in the family tree. How did it handle two so very different processors?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats. His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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The internet may not forget, but it can hardly remember something it almost never heard of. I'm looking for a computer that was described in Dr. Dobb's Journal (for those who remember what that was) and mentioned in another book about another computer. From these sources, I can pinpoint it to 1985 or earlier and that's about all the entire internet has to say about it so far. I don't even have any idea what it looked like. It must have been some sort of portable computer with internal NiCd batteries. It had some sort of LCD display for 8 lines of 40 characters, a 1200 baud modem and 64k - 256k RAM. Dimensions and weight were described as 11 by 13 by 3 1/8 inches and 12.8 pounds. It also had two interchangable processor boards, one with a CMOS Z80 and the other with a (also CMOS) CDP1805. As a CMOS system, it got a decent battery life of 12 - 80 hours out of its NiCd batteries, depending of how much use you made of the display. It was called the UDI-500 and must have been an expensive toy for managers. Does anyone have more information or even heard of it? It's like a missing relative in the family tree. How did it handle two so very different processors?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats. His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
-
The internet may not forget, but it can hardly remember something it almost never heard of. I'm looking for a computer that was described in Dr. Dobb's Journal (for those who remember what that was) and mentioned in another book about another computer. From these sources, I can pinpoint it to 1985 or earlier and that's about all the entire internet has to say about it so far. I don't even have any idea what it looked like. It must have been some sort of portable computer with internal NiCd batteries. It had some sort of LCD display for 8 lines of 40 characters, a 1200 baud modem and 64k - 256k RAM. Dimensions and weight were described as 11 by 13 by 3 1/8 inches and 12.8 pounds. It also had two interchangable processor boards, one with a CMOS Z80 and the other with a (also CMOS) CDP1805. As a CMOS system, it got a decent battery life of 12 - 80 hours out of its NiCd batteries, depending of how much use you made of the display. It was called the UDI-500 and must have been an expensive toy for managers. Does anyone have more information or even heard of it? It's like a missing relative in the family tree. How did it handle two so very different processors?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats. His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
-
The internet may not forget, but it can hardly remember something it almost never heard of. I'm looking for a computer that was described in Dr. Dobb's Journal (for those who remember what that was) and mentioned in another book about another computer. From these sources, I can pinpoint it to 1985 or earlier and that's about all the entire internet has to say about it so far. I don't even have any idea what it looked like. It must have been some sort of portable computer with internal NiCd batteries. It had some sort of LCD display for 8 lines of 40 characters, a 1200 baud modem and 64k - 256k RAM. Dimensions and weight were described as 11 by 13 by 3 1/8 inches and 12.8 pounds. It also had two interchangable processor boards, one with a CMOS Z80 and the other with a (also CMOS) CDP1805. As a CMOS system, it got a decent battery life of 12 - 80 hours out of its NiCd batteries, depending of how much use you made of the display. It was called the UDI-500 and must have been an expensive toy for managers. Does anyone have more information or even heard of it? It's like a missing relative in the family tree. How did it handle two so very different processors?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats. His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
Dr. Dobb's Journal - Vol 9 : People's Computer Company : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive[^]
“Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.” ― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
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You can still access Dr Dobb's Journal through the archives[^]. Even supports text search. Let us know what you find.
Not very much more came up, but I found at least two other interesting articles. One was about the source code for a PDP-8 emulator which could run on both my old Elf and the Zwölf on the breadboard. And there is a complete implementation of floating point routines that also would work on both. Zwölf does not have anything like that, so I might adapt and include this one. And there is also a reference to an article about some kind of hardware support for indexed addressing for 8080 based systems. It was only mentioned in a letter from a reader and he thought about doing the same to the Z80s, 6800s and 6502s of this world. His comment regarding the CDP1802 makes me even more curious: WHAT FOR??? That could mean that he understood the little 1802 only too well, or possibly not at all.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats. His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
