Poly 1 Computer

[lance.ewing]

This is totally unrelated to the VIC 20, but I thought that a few people might be interested in this.

I discovered this only a couple of weeks ago. I am originally from New Zealand. I was born there, grew up there, went to school there, started working there. Up until about 10 years ago I was still living there.

So being a big retro computer fan, how on earth have I never heard of this 8-bit 1980s retro computer developed in New Zealand for New Zealand schools?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly-1

https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/bl ... sition.htm

http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/homepages/and ... y/Poly.htm

For 1981, this seemed like quite an impressive machine. It had 64K RAM, and supported accessing another 64K RAM above that. It had five separate "screens", two text, two graphics, and a background screen that were super imposed on top of each other. - Such a shame that the New Zealand government pulled out of the deal to purchase these to supply to New Zealand schools.

This is a real collectors item.

ThomH (@Tom), I challenge you to add support to Clock Signal for this. I might even try my hand at a Java based emulator for the Poly. The Technical manual available on the third link above has the schematics. There's another page online with a hires image of the motherboard. And the source code for the one and only existing emulator for the Poly is also available.

[cbmeeks]

Looks like a fascinating computer. Very futuristic for the time.

[highinfidelity]

Interesting! I didn't know anything about it either.I couldn't get what the Poly 1 was able to do and what not, but that's my ignorance.

Interesting design too. Very futuristic for 1981, and terribly outdated by 1989!

[Commodorianen]

Seems like it was pretty common that countries developed computers for their schools. In Sweden, we used to have ABC80 and Compis for that purpose.