- Columbia (supercontinent) (Wikipedia)
Columbia, also known as Nuna or Hudsonland, is a hypothetical ancient supercontinent. It was first proposed by John J.W. Rogers and M. Santosh in 2002 and is thought to have existed approximately 2,500 to 1,500 million years ago (Ma), in the Paleoproterozoic era. The assembly of the supercontinent was likely completed during global-scale collisional events from 2,100 to 1,800 Ma.
- Benchmarking Basic on Vintage Computers (techtinkering.com)
There are a few machines I’m quite interested in comparing so I decided to create a simple Basic benchmark to get an idea of their relative speed. The benchmark tests 7 aspects and is inspired by qsbb, which is included with the qlay Sinclair QL emulator. The Basic source code for all the machines tested is available in the GitHub repo. I chose Basic because it was available on all the machines I wanted to test and because the versions I created for each machine would require few changes.
- Amstrad PCW (Wikipedia)
The Amstrad PCW series is a range of personal computers produced by British company Amstrad from 1985 to 1998, and also sold under licence in Europe as the “Joyce” by the German electronics company Schneider in the early years of the series’ life. The PCW, short for Personal Computer Word-processor, was targeted at the word processing and home office markets. When it was launched, the cost of a PCW system was under 25% of the cost of almost all PC compatibles in the UK, and as a result the machine was very popular both in the UK and in Europe. The series sold 8 million units. The last two models, introduced in the mid-1990s, were commercial failures, because of falling prices, greater capabilities, and wider range of software for PC compatibles.