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This advert at the time rekindled an interest in computers that had been dormant since I left college in 1973. The price tag was just too great to afford as after the mortgage and living costs we had little disposable income. So it remained a dream.
In 1980/1 I had the opportunity to borrow an early commercial CP/M computer with twin eight inch floppy discs. The software included Wordmaster (this cam before Wordstar) and Digital Research Basic. The 4 MHz Z80 was benchmarked at 0.4 MIPS the same as the DEC PDP11-04. The PDP11-04 powered the £60,000 typesetting system we had purchased. The DEC machine featured a search-and-replace module with a primitive programming capability. It would take days to get the S-&-R to achieve what could be specified on the back of an envelope - not suitable for commercial programming.
The company thought the DEC was a real computer and that micros were just toys. My wife and I decided to invest a third of a years salary in a Sharp MZ80B with CP/M, twin 5¼in disc drives and a 80 column dot matrix printer (Sharp P5). Software was Wordstar and Digital Research CB80 a fully compiled commercial basic.
It took a while to replicate the many to many search-and-replace program found on the DEC but when benchmarked the DEC (written in assembler) completed the task in 30 seconds. The CB80 version running on the sharp took 60 seconds - the DEC cost 20 times as much as the Sharp.
The benchmark and a few other demonstrations changed the course of computing in one large printing company and added to the growing pace of change that soon swept away the traditional industry.
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