Jupiter Ace

The Jupiter Ace was a home computer company Jupiter Cantab, which appeared in September 1982, developed and distributed by two former Sinclair employees: backwater Richard and Steven Vickers.

It has many similarities with the Sinclair ZX81, for example, the Z80A - CPU with 3.5 MHz clock frequency, the 8192 -byte ROM and the simple black and white graphic. Housing and keyboard of the series model are strongly reminiscent of the ZX Spectrum, some pre-series were delivered in the case of the ZX80 to editors of computer magazines.

Special feature: Instead of the BASIC programming language which was commonly used in the early 8 -bit machines, was implemented in the Jupiter Ace FORTH. He was three to ten times faster than a similar machines with BASIC as a programming language.

In Germany the manual for the Jupiter Ace could be purchased separately in advance, the purchase price was credited to the subsequent purchase of the hardware. As with the Sinclair models implemented dialect of the programming language was described in detail and been didactically in the context of a small rate of Vickers. Despite these marketing activities and quite positive reviews in the computer magazines, the device could - perhaps most notably because of the small memory - not prevail. Other reasons were that BASIC had become at the time when home computers as a problem-oriented high-level language for quasi-standard and there were hardly any commercial software for the Jupiter Ace. Economically, the unit was a flop and after a short time ( in 1983 ) disappeared from the market.