KC85 Attic Project

I put up a little KC85 website.

I got into computing about 20 years ago, one of the computers my daddy bought for me back then was the KC85/4. (Yes, he bought several, and I love him for laying the foundation that got me into computing.) It was the last model of East Germany's state planned homecomputer range.

The Kc85 series is a U880 CPU-based 8-bit system, U880 being the GDR's clone of the Zilog Z80. As usual for homecomputers it came with built-in BASIC interpreter and memory monitor, it connected to a standard PAL TV set.

With the built-in BASIC interpreter it was a great system for learning! Computer education was taken important in East Germany, the government put a lot of effort in deploying KC85's and programming classes into schools and community centers. I have once read that about 200.000 East Germans could "speak" BASIC - that is 1% of the population! Imaging if today's kids would start their computing experience with BASIC instead of World of Warcraft or Instant Messaging.

I still have a lot of cassette tapes containing KC85 software. I believe most of this data hasn't made it into the information age. So I decided to gradually digitise and publish it on the kc85.datahammer.info subdomain.

So far the Datahammer Editor with its powerfull hex-mode has come in very handy to edit all the binaries ripped off the tapes.