WaveMate Bullet

The WaveMate Bullet was a Z80 Single Board Computer from the late 1970's and early 1980's which used the CP/M operating system. This computer is rarely seen now but has historical value as an early microcomputer pioneer. It was sold in Australia, the USA and Europe and was apparently popular in academic settings.

The WaveMate Bullet is notable because it represents CP/M machines at their apex. Small yet affordable machines which were quite powerful at the time with plentiful applications. WaveMate is an historically relevant company because one of the original microcomputer companies which released their first computer kit the WaveMate Jupiter II in 1975. The WaveMate Bullet represents the end of the CP/M era as the IBM PC and its clones ascended to marketplace domination. [http://www.thepcmuseum.net/timeline.php]

The WaveMate Bullet runs CP/M 3.0 and CP/M 2.2 is available. It is available in many configurations but typically is found in a small chassis with two 96 tracks per inch 5.25" floppy disk drives. The 5.25" disks were formatted on both sides with five 1024 byte sectors per track with 80 tracks per side for a total of 800K per disk.

The standard configurations includes two serial ports, a parallel port, an external bus interface, separate connectors for 5.25" and 8" floppy disk drives, and a hard disk interface. The hard disk interface is either IMI hard disk controller model #7710 or SCSI depending on the motherboard version.

The WaveMate Bullet is a vintage computer which predates the IBM PC and is of interest to vintage computer enthusiasts. It was mentioned by Don Maslin (deceased), key member of Dina-SIG and a widely known and respected figure in the vintage computer community, on the [http://classiccmp.org/cctalk.html CCTALK] mailing list as belonging in the top 150 all time collectible microcomputers. [http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/1999-June/128669.html]

External links

* [http://groups.google.com/group/wavemate_computers Google Group for people interested in the WaveMate Bullet]

References

* [http://bitsavers.org/pdf/wavemate/Wave_Mate_Bullet_SBC.pdf WaveMate Bullet manual]