Talk:Camputers Lynx

Some confusion here on the Lynx 128. The hardware was a new ground-up redesign, based on the 48. It wasn't a re-branding of the old computer (I did the new hardware myself; I still have all the original design documentation). I'm pretty sure that both John and Davis did no work at all during 1983, and the 128 came out sometime around Christmas '83. I'm also pretty sure that the 128 had 512x512 bit-mapped graphics, not '256x252'.

It's not correct to say that 'the machine had very little software available'. The 128 ran CP/M, and so had a vast amount of software available. I personally ran WordStar, and Fortran and C compilers, among other things. I already owned a Nascom, and had worked at Sinclair, as well as writing Fortran and machine code on both mini and mainframes (starting with punched cards). The Lynx was in at the start of something new - not just another games console, but something which combined usability with real computing power, which I'd never seen before.

The article says that the 96 also ran CP/M, but I don't personally recall this. The software guys presumably did the initial port on the 96, but I don't think this was ever released.

I personally would get rid of the last paragraph. What made the Lynx unusual was that it had bit-mapped graphics, at a time when most other machines used character-based displays. This was definitely the way of the future but, with a clock speed of only 4 or 6MHz, a basic tty-style display looked slow compared to others. The performance issue also meant that the BASIC editor didn't scroll, which went down badly at the cheap end of the market. It's difficult to appreciate now just how innovative bit-mapped graphics were in '83. It let us have proportional spacing, for example, which was basically unheard of at the time. Character graphics dragged on for many years afterwards (thanks to the IBM PC, mainly), but would only be used now in the simplest low-end applications. 82.70.243.134 (talk) 12:28, 4 January 2013 (UTC)