Sharp MZ
Encyclopedia
The Sharp MZ is a series of personal computer
s sold in Japan
and Europe
(particularly Germany
and Great Britain
) by Sharp
beginning in 1978.
From the first Z80 processor-based model to the MZ-2200 in 1983, the MZ computers included the PC, monitor
, keyboard, and tape-based recorder in a single unit, similar to Commodore's PET
series. It was also notable for not including a programming language
or operating system
in ROM
, like the IBM PC
. This allowed a host of third-party companies, starting with Hudson Soft
, to produce many languages and OSes for the system. In an era when floppy disk
drives were too expensive for most home users, the MZ's built-in tape drive was considered faster and more reliable than the drive on competing computers; however, this meant that the MZ series was relatively slow to adopt floppy drives as a standard accessory.
In 1982, Sharp's television
division released the X1
, a completely new computer. The X series proved to outsell Sharp's own MZ series, and in response, Sharp released the MZ-1500/2500 machines, which featured powered-up graphics and sound capabilities. However, this series saw little marketplace success, and eventually the company abandoned the line in favor of the X68000 series.
The MZ name lives on as the initials of two of Sharp's most well-known products: the Mebius line of PCs, and the Zaurus line of personal digital assistant
s.
The Sharp MZ80K was one of the popular early consumer-level microcomputers, with an architecture based on the Zilog Z80
8-bit microprocessor. It was introduced into Europe in 1979. The machine had 48KB of RAM, 32KB of which was available for user programs (the actual figure was dependent on the memory configuration and the system languages being used). It could run a variety of high-level languages including BASIC
, Pascal
and FORTRAN
, which had to be loaded into RAM before any programming could be undertaken. It could also be programmed directly in assembly code or machine code. The machine had an inbuilt monochrome display and a cassette tape drive. The display, keyboard and cassette drive lifted on hinges to expose the motherboard and circuitry underneath. Graphics capability was primitive, with only preset shapes and icons being available and no native hi-res capability. This was not unusual for a late-1970s vintage microcomputer. The main drawback, however, of the MZ-80K was the non-standard keyboard, which was difficult to use.
The MZ-80K sold well in Europe despite its high price (it retailed at over £500 in 1980), and a large range of software was available, including some Japanese arcade games. It was superseded in 1982 by the MZ-80A machine.
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
s sold in Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
and Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
(particularly Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
and Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
) by Sharp
Sharp Corporation
is a Japanese multinational corporation that designs and manufactures electronic products. Headquartered in Abeno-ku, Osaka, Japan, Sharp employs more than 55,580 people worldwide as of June 2011. The company was founded in September 1912 and takes its name from one of its founder's first...
beginning in 1978.
Overview
Although commonly believed to stand for "Microcomputer Z80", the term MZ actually has its roots in the MZ-40K, a home computer kit produced by Sharp in 1978 which was based on Fujitsu's 4-bit MB8843 processor and provided a simple hexadecimal keypad for input. This was soon followed by the MZ-80K, K2, C, and K2E, all of which were based on 8-bit LH0080A Sharp CPU (compatible to Zilog Z80A) with an alphanumeric keyboard.Computer display
A monitor or display is an electronic visual display for computers. The monitor comprises the display device, circuitry, and an enclosure...
, keyboard, and tape-based recorder in a single unit, similar to Commodore's PET
Commodore PET
The Commodore PET was a home/personal computer produced from 1977 by Commodore International...
series. It was also notable for not including a programming language
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
or operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
in ROM
Read-only memory
Read-only memory is a class of storage medium used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM cannot be modified, or can be modified only slowly or with difficulty, so it is mainly used to distribute firmware .In its strictest sense, ROM refers only...
, like the IBM PC
IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
. This allowed a host of third-party companies, starting with Hudson Soft
Hudson Soft
, formally known as , is a majority-owned subsidiary of Konami Corporation is a Japanese electronic entertainment publisher headquartered in the Midtown Tower in Tokyo Midtown, Akasaka, Minato, Tokyo, Japan, with an additional office in the Hudson Building in Sapporo. It was founded on May 18, 1973...
, to produce many languages and OSes for the system. In an era when floppy disk
Floppy disk
A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier lined with fabric that removes dust particles...
drives were too expensive for most home users, the MZ's built-in tape drive was considered faster and more reliable than the drive on competing computers; however, this meant that the MZ series was relatively slow to adopt floppy drives as a standard accessory.
Product Line
The MZ series is divided into several lines, including the text-based MZ-80K series, the graphics-based MZ-80B series, and the MZ-3500/5500 series, based on a completely different architecture.In 1982, Sharp's television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
division released the X1
Sharp X1
The X1 is a series of home computer released by Sharp Corporation from 1982 to 1988. It was based on a Z80 CPU.Despite the fact that the Computer Division of Sharp Corporation had released the MZ series, suddenly the Television Division released a new computer series called the X1...
, a completely new computer. The X series proved to outsell Sharp's own MZ series, and in response, Sharp released the MZ-1500/2500 machines, which featured powered-up graphics and sound capabilities. However, this series saw little marketplace success, and eventually the company abandoned the line in favor of the X68000 series.
The MZ name lives on as the initials of two of Sharp's most well-known products: the Mebius line of PCs, and the Zaurus line of personal digital assistant
Personal digital assistant
A personal digital assistant , also known as a palmtop computer, or personal data assistant, is a mobile device that functions as a personal information manager. Current PDAs often have the ability to connect to the Internet...
s.
MZ-80K group
Zilog Z80
The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed by Zilog and sold from July 1976 onwards. It was widely used both in desktop and embedded computer designs as well as for military purposes...
8-bit microprocessor. It was introduced into Europe in 1979. The machine had 48KB of RAM, 32KB of which was available for user programs (the actual figure was dependent on the memory configuration and the system languages being used). It could run a variety of high-level languages including BASIC
BASIC
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....
, Pascal
Pascal (programming language)
Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.A derivative known as Object Pascal...
and FORTRAN
Fortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
, which had to be loaded into RAM before any programming could be undertaken. It could also be programmed directly in assembly code or machine code. The machine had an inbuilt monochrome display and a cassette tape drive. The display, keyboard and cassette drive lifted on hinges to expose the motherboard and circuitry underneath. Graphics capability was primitive, with only preset shapes and icons being available and no native hi-res capability. This was not unusual for a late-1970s vintage microcomputer. The main drawback, however, of the MZ-80K was the non-standard keyboard, which was difficult to use.
The MZ-80K sold well in Europe despite its high price (it retailed at over £500 in 1980), and a large range of software was available, including some Japanese arcade games. It was superseded in 1982 by the MZ-80A machine.
- MZ-80K series
- MZ-80K (1978) - An all-in-one kit with keyboard.
- MZ-80C - Featured an improved keyboard and 48KB of memory.
- MZ-80K2 - The assembled version of the 80K.
- MZ-80K2E - A low-price version of the 80K2.
- MZ-80A (1982)/MZ-1200 - A upgraded version of the 80K with improved keyboard, more VRAMVRAMVideo RAM, or VRAM, is a dual-ported variant of dynamic RAM , which was once commonly used to store the framebuffer in some graphics adapters....
and a green-screen VDU.
- MZ-700 series (MZ-80K machines with color graphics)
- MZ-700 (1982) - The first MZ without a built-in monitor; an optional data recorder and plotter could also be installed to the machine. More-or-less fully compatible with the MZ-80K.
- MZ-800 (1985) - The first MZ with a 640×200-pixel graphics mode. Not available in Japan.
- MZ-1500 (1984) - Features 320×200-pixel graphics and built-in sound capability. The tape recorder has been replaced with a floppy drive that reads 2.8-inch Quick Disks.
MZ-80B group
This offshoot of the MZ-80K line was primarily marketed for business use.- MZ-80B series
- MZ-80B (1981) - 320x200-pixel graphics. (Extra VRAM optional)
- MZ-80B2 - An 80B with extra VRAM installed. Sold alongside the MZ-2000 for most of the lineup's lifetime.
- MZ-2000 (1982) - 640x200-pixel monochrome monitor built-in; color optional. BASICBASICBASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....
-level compatible with the MZ-80B. - MZ-2200 (1983) - The only monitorless, standalone unit in the series.
- MZ-2500 (SuperMZ) series - Launched in 1985, the computers in this series all used a Z80B processor running at 6MHz. They included a data recorder and at least one 3.5 internal floppy disk drive, as well as a YM2203 FMFrequency modulation synthesisA 220 Hz carrier tone modulated by a 440 Hz modulating tone with various choices of modulation index, β. The time domain signals are illustrated above, and the corresponding spectra are shown below ....
sound chip, hardware scrolling, and a palette of 256 colors (upgradable to 4096). This makes them among the most powerful 8-bit machines ever released for home use. Some models are also compatible with the MZ-80B and MZ-2000.- MZ-2511
- MZ-2520 - The 2511 without a data recorder and the MZ-80B/2000 compatibility modes.
- MZ-2521
- MZ-2531(MZ-2500V2) (1986)
- MZ-2800 series
- MZ-2861 (1987) - A hybrid 16-bit machine running on an Intel 80286 and a Z80 for MZ-2500 compatibility. It could run MS-DOSMS-DOSMS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...
in 16-bit mode, as well as a PC98 emulatorEmulatorIn computing, an emulator is hardware or software or both that duplicates the functions of a first computer system in a different second computer system, so that the behavior of the second system closely resembles the behavior of the first system...
.
- MZ-2861 (1987) - A hybrid 16-bit machine running on an Intel 80286 and a Z80 for MZ-2500 compatibility. It could run MS-DOS
MZ-3500/5500/6500 group
A line of business PCs shoehorned into the MZ lineup. All of them feature 5.25-inch floppy disk drives.- MZ-3500 series (1982) - Runs on two Z80A processors.
- MZ-3541 - FDOS and EOS (CP/M compatible)
- MZ-5500 series (1983) - An MS-DOSMS-DOSMS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...
-based machine running on an Intel 8086Intel 8086The 8086 is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between early 1976 and mid-1978, when it was released. The 8086 gave rise to the x86 architecture of Intel's future processors...
processor. - MZ-6500 series (1984) - A high-speed version of the MZ-5500 marketed as a CAD workstation.
- MZ-6500
- MZ-6550 - A vertically-mounted machine with an 80286 processor and a 3.5-inch floppy drive.
Other
- MZ-8000 series - A line of PC/AT-compatible machines running on 80286 and 80386 processors.