Over the 1984/85 summer, i earned enough money to buy my first computer. I was never going to be able to afford one of the big names, but my neighbour was selling some Apple II clones made in Singapore by Limco. I’m not sure that it was the most well-informed purchase that i’ve ever made, but the computer got me through my final year of uni and taught me a lot of things along the way.
It sat in a cupboard for many years and then in my shed for many more before i boldly applied power in about 2014. To my surprise, it booted up fine. I added a super serial card and used ADTPro to back up my floppy disks.
Compatibility is not perfect, but most programs run ok. The included CP/M included a RAM disk which used the additional 64k of memory. The keyboard interface is unique, but i have deciphered it so that i can use a PS/2 keyboard if the original fails.
The monitor is a rebadged Mitsubishi unit similar to the ones that were often used with Microbee computers.
It has two Chinon floppy disk drives in the flip top chassis. I’ve since added a couple more external drives – 160kB is not a lot to work with.
The machine came with an “80 column emulator”, a ROM Card, a disk controller, and a SAM card for speech synthesis.
The SAM card always amused people back in the eighties.
The white solder resist seems to have been unusual at the time. It seems to have been used on other Limco products as well.
The power supply is quite a neat unit.
It has RGB built-in. I only got to see it work 30 years after i bought it!
Sadly, i stupidly gave away the printer about 30 years ago. It was a rebadged Panasonic unit.