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VINTAGE COMMODORE CBM8032 COMPUTER

This is not a true evaluation, plus the product was not intended to produce light, so my standard review format will not be used here.
This web page was opened on 04-12-08, and was last updated on 07-24-08.

Although this is not an LED product, I've published reviews & informational web pages for other non-LED, non-laser, and non-light products on this website.
So adding a section to this website about vintage ghetto blasters and vintage computers was pretty much inevitable.

The below graphic is from www.vintage-computer.com and was used without permission - not for profitable reasons or anything.

*** VERY IMPORTANT!!! ***
These web pages are about computers I actually *HAVE* at this very moment (early-April 2008), not machines I once had but no longer do, such as those which were lost during moves, left in pawn shops, etc. like my Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, Radio Shack Model 1, Timex Sinclair 1000, Radio Shack Model 3, a Radio Shack handheld, Radio Shack Coco 3, Apple Macintosh Powerbook 140, "dumb terminals" (like my Hazeltine 2000, and several others), etc. These web pages will also *NOT* include computers I use at this time, except perhaps the Toshiba Satellite Pro 460CDT laptop, since it is over ten years old, and may be considered "vintage". The Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop was frequently used; it was left in a pawn shop in the early-1990s because I could not come up with a measly $10 more I needed to get it out of hawk.

THIS WILL BE THE LAST NON-FLASHLIGHT, NON-LED, NON-LASER PAGE TO BE ADDED TO THIS WEBSITE.

The Commodore CBM 8032 was an improvement over the PET 4032 ("PET" stands for Personal Electronic Transactor) in three significant ways.
1: The 8032 has 32K of RAM (vs. 16K for the 4032).
2: It has an 80-column display, not a 40-column one.
3: It has a real keyboard, not a "chiclet" keyboard.

I purchased a dual drive MSD disk drive for this computer not long after I purchased this computer in mid-2003, but was unable to locate the correct cable - and the drive unit itself got left in Seattle in late-May 2006 when I moved to Sacramento.

This computer has a whopping 32K (that's right, 32,768 bytes!!! - of which, 31,743 bytes are available to the user) of RAM - but back around 1980 or 1981, that's all you really needed.
This is in large part because programs ("applications") written for this computer were relatively simple, and could be loaded directly from cassette tape or diskette with the computer's OS (operating system) running entirely from ROM (read only memory).

So virtually all 32K was available for the program code itself plus a small amount of space to store variables used by that program - none is needed for the OS.

The startup screen from this computer.

Here's a closing shot of this computer. :-)

UPDATE: 07-23-08
This computer is now being offered free to a good home.
I really hate to have to get rid of it, but my stepmother (who's house we'll be moving to on or very shortly prior to 08-01-08) is pretty adamant{sp?} that I dispose of it. :(
I'm offering it *FREE* to help ensure that somebody gets it rather than knowing that the "big fat meanie" {from SpongeBob SquarePants} (garbage truck) got it. :(

UPDATE: 07-24-08
This computer is now gone - it was picked up yesterday at ~2:54pm PDT.

Do you manufacture or sell an LED flashlight, task light, utility light, or module of some kind? Want to see it tested by a real person, under real working conditions? Do you then want to see how your light did? If you have a sample available for this type of real-world, real-time testing, please contact me at ledmuseum@gmail.com.

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