The Nascom 2
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The Nascom 1 versus the Nascom 2
The Nascom 2 home computer kit
The Nascom 2 was my first computer..
“To minimise cost, the buyer had to assemble a Nascom 2 by hand-soldering about 3,000 joints on the single circuit board - Wikipedia” So it was a large kit and just building it would have been a challenge !!
And it was uncased and needed a power supply, but unlike the Nascom 1, it could drive a monitor as well as a TV, so it was really a major construction project for a very keen and capable electronics enthusiast
Nascom Faces Disaster…
Back then, it was quite normal for home computer companies to rather speculatively announce new products before going into production 1 and sometimes even before the development was completed 2. Later this became known as “vapourware”
In Nascom’s case, it looks like they based their design, production & marketing plans upon the promise of the very near-future availability of some new static rams and when they failed to materialise, Nascom were left in a very difficult financial position, with a lot of computer kits as incomplete stock that they could not sell or ship
So Nascom were between “a rock and a hard place” and the way they solved it was to upgrade their original product offering by adding a 48k Dynamic RAM board populated with 16k of Dynamic RAM 3 and adding an 8k Microsoft Basic Interpreter in Rom
My Biggest Mistake !!
At that time I was very focussed and determined to learn all about the Nascom, the Z80 and its machine code that I had no interest in BASIC at all !!
So later on, when I was well into “the Nascom, the Z80 and its machine code”, etc, and really getting results, I took out the 8k Microsoft BASIC ROM and gave it away to another Nascom enthusiast…
A few years later when I learned that the 8k BASIC was personally written by Bill Gates (and Paul Allen) I realised just what a big mistake I had made !!
My Nascom 2 Software Tools
I spent quite a while learning and using my Nascom 2 setup with the ZEAP assembler package and the NAS-DIS debugger, storing the source on a cassette tape machine. Eventally, I got to the point with my learning adventures that I realised this was not a platform for any serious software development…
The access time of Eproms & RAM in those days was 450nS - The “fast” static RAM on the eZ80 are 10nS [^8] access time and this is “slow” for the eZ80, so it has to insert “wait states” to access them…
Wireless World Archive: https://worldradiohistory.com/Wireless_World_Magazine.htm
https://80bus.co.uk.mirror.jloh.de/pages/nascom/images/imp.jpg
https://80bus.co.uk.mirror.jloh.de/pages/nascom/imp.htm
https://80bus.co.uk.mirror.jloh.de/pages/nascom.htm
https://80bus.co.uk.mirror.jloh.de/pages/nascom/nascom2.htm
http://www.nascomhomepage.com/
http://nascomhomepage.com/pdf/zeap.pdf
https://www.z80cpu.eu/mirrors/oldcomputers.dyndns.org/public/pub/manuals/NASCOM_ZEAP_1.0.pdf
http://www.emsps.com/oldtools/msbasv.htm
All companies seemed to announce a new product, take orders with payment, and use that money to finance the production of the new product ↩
Clive Sinclair took it a stage too far and after his antics this “modus operandi” came to an end, and when making payment by credit card became established, it was required to ONLY take payment AFTER product had been shipped… ↩
And that was rather radical at the time, as I don’t believe a Z80-based system had then been sold with Dynamic RAM. Given that this Dynamic RAM card was in stock and in production illustrates that Nascom did R&D and were not a “vapourware” company like many at the time were… ↩