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The British Micro Behemoth
Or, how a precocious youth briefly conquered the UK
This achievement was the work of Chris Curry and Jim Westwood after they realized that the capacitance of the TMS1802 and the seven segment galium arsenide LEDs that made up the display would keep state for a bit despite power loss. We squeezed the control routines and the BASIC for the whole machine on to one tiny ROM, and we took advantage of the television sets and audio players already in people’s homes to avoid having to supply these ourselves. The screen had a true graphics mode of 256 by 192 pixels with 15 colors (blue, red, purple, green, cyan, yellow, white; each with two brightness values), and the machine now had a beeper (single channel, 10 octaves).
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