Radofin Aquarius

From: Eric Fischer <eric_at_fudge.uchicago.edu>
Date: Mon Jun 9 21:48:13 1997

jeffh_at_unix.aardvarkol.com said,

> Of course, Sam and others have taken to talking about the Mattel
> Aquarius lately, but I've never seen a mention of the Radofin
> version, which other than the lack of 'Mattel' logos and the change
> to the model number and label on the bottom of the machine, is
> identical.

I bought one of these at a second-hand store a few weeks ago
and didn't even notice until I got it home that there was no
mention of Mattel anywhere on the box. I would have assumed
it was earlier than the Mattel version, not later, because
it's got a 1983 copyright date on it and I can't imagine
anyone buying an Aquarius (for full price) any later than
that.

Scott Ware mentioned there being four languages on the box
of his. Mine has five: English, French, German, Italian,
and Spanish, though there are some things that only appear
in English and French and a few that are in English only.

Bill Whitson mentioned the heavy shielding -- yes, there's
a *lot* of metal inside the case, and sufficiently soldered
down to make me wonder whether their goal wasn't so much to
prevent RF interference as to keep people from snooping at
the electronics.


Mine came with a box but no manuals, so all I know about it
is the location of the start of screen memory (revealed as
12328 in a photo of the manual reproduced on the box) and
the usual things that you expect to find in a Microsoft
BASIC. The most interesting thing about it to me was that
it comes up in lowercase by default, which seems to be
almost unheard of in early 1980s micros. I was also surprised
that it accepts both ^X and ^U as line-erase characters in its
line editor, but then I got a TRS-80 Model 100 and it does the
same thing, so maybe this is just something common to the
later MS BASICs.

eric
Received on Mon Jun 09 1997 - 21:48:13 BST