Big orange danish microcomputer.
https://www.thedanishcomet.com/
The book can be found here.
https://www.thedanishcomet.com/forudbestilling/
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There is a talk on the ICL Comet (it’s a COMAL machine) based on the concept of the book on YouTube:
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Another of Mike’s videos, the ICL Comet 8 here looks utterly unlike an orange box. It’s teal, for a start… but it runs CP/M and COMAL.
But here’s the orange Comet, in a teardown video
As far as I can tell, Regnecentralen’s RC 700 aka PICCOLO is a related machine. You can read about it here and even run an emulation in your browser, including running ICL COMAL.
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Back in 1995, I were doing some education (computing) in the Danish city called Sønderborg (sonderburg in german). And we had to do basic programming on a Comet. However. There were rumours, that the graduating class at that time, had managed to get a Linux kernal running on a Comet. But yeah. I remember traking classes in computer architecture and programming, were the Comet were used as the example. I am not going to say that I think it is a bad machine, but I remember being happy to move to X86 Assembler instead.
Mike from the Video here! Thanks for the kind mention!
@to9xct I can guarantee you that the rumours you mentioned where just that, rumours. In my dayjob i work mainly with Linux systems, but as a developper and an administrator, with years of experience in both, and in my spare-time I restore Comet computers … I can guarantee you that there is no way of getting Linux, even as we knew it in 1995, to run on a Comet 3000,3700,1400, 2000 or 8.
However! There was a Comet 32, which was a 32 bit machine running UNIX. It was sold as a multiuser system with up to 1MB of memory! More information will be available, as we uncover and curate it, at ICL Comet 32 – Danish Computers
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Sorry for the extremely late reply. I have been absent from most vintage computing for a looooong time (mental stuff, no energy). When I look at that picture, then I remember that Sønderborg håndværkerskole (were I attended in 95) had machines like that. So perhaps they did get it running, just on the 32bit machine instead.
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