16 Dec
2001
16 Dec
'01
9:19 p.m.
I stumbled upon a link some time ago belonging to a
very bitter former owner of Sphere. The gist of his
article was that Byte Magazine destroyed Sphere with a
very bad review, and, that most computers of that era
took some hacking to work anyway (example: the "clock"
- and I use the term clock charitably - of the
original Altair 8800).
I have to side with Byte - Spheres really are junk. I obtained mine from
an old time micro hacker (one of those that had to buy one way back in
1975) from the 6800 side of the tracks. He really had nothing good to say
about Sphere - crappy construction, crappy engineering, crappy
salesmanships, crappy software. Apparently there was a fair amount of
empty promises from Sphere as well.
He did think reasonably highly of SWTPCo and the Motorola Exorsizor,
however. I have to agree with him - the SWTPCo box is a reasonably decent
cheap design that needed "minimal" hacking to get to work.
William Donzelli
aw288(a)osfn.org