Talk:NABU Network

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Took one apart[edit]

Was considering buying a NABU home computer unit, but thought that the expansion capabilities inside were proprietary. The expansion bus sockets inside were not S-100 bus of the late 1970s and the power supply was likely not able to operate such high power consumption expansion cards. Expensive proprietary cards would likely be the only choice.

It had a unique joystick controller with 3+ axis output--up/down, left/right, forward/back, &, if I recall correctly, twisting the handle too. One of the popular games was the BC game where a cave man would ride a single stone wheel with its single wooden axle under his bare feet down a hill with lots of obstacles to hop over or land on. The goal was to avoid all the obstacles, get the bonuses, and make it to the finish line.

The long corded, black colored, full size keyboard was quite nicely sculptured. A typing tutor game called Wiz-Type would have words/phrases appear that the player had to type in, or risk losing the game. It would measure the words per minute achieved. Game audio / music would play through the user's TV.

The dark colored case was light gauge sheet steel fastened together by screws.

A diskette drive cost about CDN$200 then, but for this computer would have cost much more due to the proprietary nature of the machine. NABU had a cassette interface and BASIC language interpreter.

The IBM PC (CDN $1,800 - $3,000) had come out & had diskette drive(s) & 16/8-bit Intel i8088 at 4.77 MHz & a standard ISA 8-bit signal bus with a number of expansion bus slots. The Apple II & IBM PC both used switching power supplies rather than the late 1970s bulky 60 Hz linear power supplies of the S-100 bus common for most 8080 or Z80 computers of the time. The Commodore Vic-20 with only a few kilobytes of RAM, M6502 CPU chip cost under US$50 with BASIC language & no cassette drive. A small, slow Z80 chess playing experimenter computer Timex Sinclair zx-81 with small keyboard & audio cassette I/F jack, & B&W TV RF-modulator cost about US$30 on sale at drug stores.

A white colored Xenix computer with hard disks running an 8086 came out called the Nabu-16 Business computer or similar such name. A Bell Northern Research co-op student school friend bought one 1983 or so with 3 x 10 Mbyte hard disks, and floppy disk drives. Oldspammer (talk) 10:02, 26 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Additional information to be included[edit]

There seems to be quite a bit available at [1]. Don't have time to include it these days, however. Martinp (talk) 15:54, 25 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

And quite a bit more published today at [2]. Martinp (talk) 17:45, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This new YouTube video by Jared Boone gives a detailed technical description of the cable modem.

The 40-Year-Old Cable Modem (part 1) - April 17, 2024

The video also shows a few pages from the user manual. According to the page "NABU adaptor technical specifications" the downlink modulation method is Offset QPSK with a raw data rate of 6.312 Mbits. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 12:08, 9 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]