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Notes |
Manufacturer |
Sold under the Atari (US) brand name but actually developed by DIP of the UK. |
|
Model |
Portfolio |
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Date Launched |
June 1989 |
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Price |
£215 at launch |
|
Microprocessor type |
Intel 80C88 @ 4.915 MHz |
|
ROM size |
256 kilobytes |
|
Standard RAM |
128 kilobytes |
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Maximum RAM |
160 kilobytes with plug-in 128 KB memory card, costing £120 |
|
Keyboard type |
63 moving keys but slightly smaller than a standard keyboard, and with a strange action whereby they pivoted at the front and went down at the back. |
|
Supplied language |
No programming language was supplied but an MS-DOS 2.11-compatible operating system was built in. |
|
Text resolution |
40 x 8 characters, acting as a window onto an 80 x 25 screen |
|
Graphics resolution |
240 x 64 |
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Colours available |
Monochrome LCD display |
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Example Screenshot |
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Sound |
Internal speaker could be used for tone dialling. |
|
Cassette load speed |
No cassette interface |
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Dimensions (mm) |
198 x 104 x 31 |
|
Special features |
Five applications were stored in ROM: |
|
Good points |
Ran for around 100 hours on 3 AA batteries. |
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Bad points |
Lacked standard ports. Its memory card slot was proprietary and serial and parallel interfaces required external add-ons (costing £50 and £30 approx.) This meant extra expense to transfer files to or from a desktop PC or print wordprocessor documents. |
|
How successful? |
Quite popular, and influential as being the first pocket computer to run DOS. |
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Comments |
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