The Microbee computer was made and sold at the Microbee factory, in Wollongong, Australia.
If you thought that the Commodore 64 was a hacking machine, think again.
If something could be hacked, or changed with a soldering iron, it was done on a Microbee motherboard
by a home user!.
A little history...
The Microbee first rolled onto the public scene in early 1982. It had 16k RAM, 16k BASIC ROM, full sized keyboard,
with the option of an internal word processor (on Eprom) or an editor assembler (EDASM also on eprom).
and Hack?
I reckon that the motherboard was designed for the home-end user to hack away with. With soldering iron, will travel!
The layout of the motherboard allowed techo's to go about their way to design and fiddle, eventually the results ended up in a user-group monthly magazine for others to go about hacking.
I can remeber seeing a photo of a bloke with a big screw driver and a hammer ripping apart the plastic molding around the motherboard
to allow for an "expansion".
Ram went from a piddly little 16k to a monstrous 512k.
Battery backup had switches, and had actual battery power - a portable!
Switches for screen modes and different resolutions.
Leds for indicators for caps lock, control characters.
Music synthesisers
Voice synthesisers
Voice recognition
Up'ing the original 1200/75 cassette baud rate.
