Dragon 32/64
The Dragon 32 was introduced at the end of 1982. Its unusual CPU, the
6809E, made the Dragon in spite of its low clock speed a very fast 8-bit-computer.
1984 there were about 30 cartridges available for the Dragon. You could
connect a cassette-recorder, a printer and a diskdrive to the Dragon.
The later published operating system for the Dragon, OS/9, was also
remarkable because it appears years later as OS/9 68K for the Atari ST.
The Dragon 64 (picture) had a different case, the extended memory and
a RS232-C-Interface built-in.
The Dragon 32 was nevertheless not a success. For a time it did sell
well in the U.K. where it has still a lot of users. It was perhaps another
victim of the incapacity of it's producer to deliver at time.
The Dragon 32 was a revolutionary design - for the UK at
least - in that it broke away from tradition and offered
a Motorola 6809 microprocessor at its heart instead of
the more popular, but less powerful, Zilog Z80 and Mostek
6502 ICs. This would appear to be a wise decision for it
would make the programmers' tasks less daunting, but not
many had seen these devices before - the popular machines
of the market were the 6502 based Apple II and Commodore
PET ranges, plus the early Tandy and Sinclair models of Z80
origin. But in the United States, Tandy had 2 years earlier
released their Color Computer to great success - and this
was a 6809 design using a standard Motorola chipset for the
video display and interfacing.
| Computer: |
Dragon32 |
| Release year: | 1982
|
| CPU/Clock speed: | 6809E/0.894 MHz
|
| ROM | 16 K
|
| RAM (expandable) | 32 (64 KB) KByte
|
| Display | TV/RGB
|
| Text display: | 32 * 16
|
| Graphics display: | 162 * 256 |
| Colours: | 8
|
| Sound | 1 channel mono
|
| Operating system | OS/9
|
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