Technical data: Sharp MZ-800
The Sharp MZ-800 is an 8-bit home computer which was manufactured since late 1984. It offered an 80 chars width display, high colour graphics, 3 channel sound and high extensibility.
There was a “naked” version named MZ-811, which came without any storage device. But in Europe, the MZ-800 was sold as an MZ-821 with an inbuilt cassette recorder MZ-1T04, mostly.
There were also versions, which were sold with a quickdisk drive MZ-1F11 instead of the cassette recorder, although these were quite rare. Below, you see one of them.
The machine was powered by a Zilog Z80 processor and owned 64KB RAM and 16KB VRAM, which both could be enhanced. The MZ-800 could be extended by a large variety of peripherals, ranging from ram cards, floppy disks, printers and plotters to hardware extension boxes.
The MZ-800 was also able to run CP/M: There was a special CP/M 2.2 by Sharp named P-CP/M, which offered access to an enormous amount of business software.
And even more software was available for the MZ-800 due to its software-compatibility with the predecessor series MZ-700 and MZ-80. Due to Sharp's concept of “clean computers”, which only have a bootstrap EPROM and a machine code monitor and need to load the programming language/operating system from a mass storage device, there were lots of languages available. Some of them were: Assembler, Basic, Eumel/Elan, Forth, Fortran, Lisp, Logo, Pascal, Prolog,…