If you follow retrcomputing — or you are simply old enough to remember those days — you hear the same names over and over. Commodore, Apple, Radio Shack, and Sinclair, for example. But what about the Lambda 8300? Most people haven’t heard of these but [Mike] has and he has quite a few of them. The computer is similar to a Sinclair ZX81, but not an exact clone. All of his machines need some repairs (he’s promised repair videos are on their way), but for the video below he wired a monitor directly to the PCB to get steady output, so apparently the RF modulator is the failing subsystem in this case.
Once the video cleared up, you can see a walkthrough of running a simple BASIC program. As was common in those days, the computer used an audio cassette recorder for data storage. [Mike] picked up some dedicated recorders meant for computer use, but neither were in working shape. However, a consumer player works fine.
Cassettes are not very reliable, so [Mike] loads the audio into his phone and then uses it for future loads. We were titillated by the quick teardown and wanted to see more, but [Mike] says there are at least two more videos on the way so we guess we’ll have to freeze the video to gawk at the board until they arrive.
These machines were made to be cheap, so the CPU did everything. Keyboard I/O, screen output, and the cassette interface were all directly tied to the CPU with as little hardware assistance as possible. The Sinclair machine was also famous for this, and that made them peculiar to operate as you’ll see in th ..
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