May the forth be with the Jupiter Ace
XACE
Credit: https://github.com/lawrencewoodman/xAce
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Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker. He blogs about hacks and makes at bigl.es.
We go back to 1982 to discover that not all home computers came with BASIC. The Jupiter Ace, from the Cambridge-based Jupiter Cantab Limited computer company was an oddity of the era. The Jupiter Ace looked like a cross between a ZX81 and a hot rod and we quite like that. The design of the Jupiter Ace was down to its creators Richard Altwasser and Steven Vickers, who had previously been part of the ZX Spectrum design team. The Jupiter Ace had 2KB of dedicated video RAM, which offered a performance boost over the ZX Spectrum.
Packing a Z80 CPU running at 3.25MHz and a minimum of 1KB of RAM, the Jupiter Ace was sold for £89.99 in 1982 (approximately £277.20 adjusted for inflation). This was much lower than the Commodore 64’s £350 (an eye-watering £1,078 in today’s money) price tag.
Accessories for the Jupiter Ace included 16, 32 and 48KB RAM packs, replacement keyboards and external storage devices. Most users saved their programs directly to cassette using tape recorder, which was a common technique of the era.
Instead of running a BASIC interpreter/operating system we’re presented with Forth, a language that we shall get to grips with later (see LXF276 for more on programming the Jupiter Ace in Forth).
The Jupiter Ace wasn’t a big seller, with a reported 5,000 units made and even fewer
