Lazer 50? Toy or What?

[cgrape2]

I ran into one of these recently.It looked like a toy,but the manual with it seemed to say otherwise.My guess is it's in the same vein as the early"Pocket Computers".
Anybody have any experience with these that they would like to share?
Thanks!
cgrape2

[carlsson]

Would it be a vTech Laser 50, also known as ONE? A small 1x16 characters LCD, powered from a Z80 with 2-18K RAM and 8K ROM. Made in 1984/85, once sold as an educational personal pocket computer. One of its benefits it to draw relatively little power. A set of four AA batteries can last up to 200 hours of operation. With a power supply it draws 6V, 15 mA.

vTech still is in the business but today mostly focused on toys like the vSmile and other consumer products. Back in the day you may remember they were the first (?) to legally produce an Apple II clone without using Apple's ROMs. They made a lot more home computers, video games and handheld games on top of that.

[cgrape2]

Thanks for the background info.So they do have a "Real" processor.Interesting.
Do they use Basic?
cgrape2

[carlsson]

Eh, yes. See for example the entry at Old-Computers.com. A bit of Google search will reveal a few more pages, although I doubt there is much material about it.

[cgrape2]

I'm having trouble with visualizing what 2kb of ram could hold.Forgive my lack of understanding here.I know what a byte is and a kilobyte is 100 bytes,but I can't seem to "see" what that adds up to in a program sense.(It's my brain's interconnections not functioning again.)
cgrape2

[Zeela]

A kilobyte is 1024 bytes... So you have 2048 bytes for your programs.

[cgrape2]

Argh,messed up again.It's 1000 not 100.(I am suprised I find my front door somedays...)Thanks for the correction.It now makes more sense.
cgrape2

[barythrin]

Yeah, the memory does give one a slight jog when trying to figure out what you could do with it. Depending on what the system has (looks like this one has built-in basic) it would be more useful as a tool and advanced calculator although there are small games folks wrote for systems with little memory but they're mostly guessing a calculation or trajectory for landing something without crashing. I suppose one could program battleship which would be fun and I'm sure there are some card games you could write and play.

[cgrape2]

Good suggestions!As I'm attempting to relearn Basic,it might be a good tool.Lightweight and sorta odd.
cgrape2

[carlsson]

Depending on the Basic implementation, 2 kilobyte can actually be a quite decent amount of RAM for small programs that don't involve lots of variables and matrices. On the other hand, as you noticed this particular handheld computer could be expanded by 16K to give you a total of 18 kilobyte RAM. I know this was true for many similar machines, i.e. Casio PB-700 which I have personal experience of.