The EXL 100 was done by people who worked at Texas Instruments. It uses a lot of technologies of the TI CC40 (like the basic and the CPU for exemple). All the hardware is based on Texas Instruments chips. The TMS 7020 is the CPU, the TMS 7041 manages all I/O, the speech synthesizer (TMS 5220) and the infrared receiver. The keyboard and the joysticks are linked by infrared to the CPU.
Several peripherals were developped for this computer : a dot matrix printer (EXL 80) and a modem (ExelModem). This computer didn't have a great market success. It was above all used in schools.
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Hello,
I seeks hopelessly a diskette of boot (EXELDOS) for my EXL135 Exelvision.
If you can helping me, please contact me.
I thank you.
Friday 11th June 2004
toor (France)
The EXL100 was my first computer and I really love it. I learnt BASIC on it before switching to Pascal and assembler language on a PC1512 computer. I was 11 years old when I bought this computer in 1985.
It is true that at this time, the computer was lacking a lot of sotware and especially some games. I still have the first game I programmed in Basic on a magnetic tape. It was named "Le château du professeur Megabus" (The castle of professor Megabus in english). It was a text adventure game I designed after a friend of mine told me about the "DIM" basic instruction :-).
I had a pro keyboard. But the infra-red link did not work very well if the EXL100 casing had been removed for repair (this happened to me after an electronic component burnt into the computer). I had to positionate the keyboard very precisely for a correct use. I have put some pins onto a wood frame so that the keyboard always had the same location on my desk !
The EXELBASIC was very neat. It had a powerful instruction set but the editor was not so great. At this time, my dream was to have the EXELASSEMBLER cartridge but it was very expensive.
I remember having a lot of trouble with the tape recorder I used with. Some tapes did not work properly and I always got an error message (ERROR 255 i think...). The first game I bought was ATI 42 on a tape and NEURONES. I had a lot of troubles with NEURONES because of this famous "loading" error.
Games such as "Tennis" and "Wizord" were really great. I never used the game pads but the keyboard instead. Game pads had a numerical keyboard that could be used with the keyboard.
I also had "IMAGIX" for graphical creations. But it was necesary to have the 16K non volatile Memory Extension to import the graphics into a BASIC program.
Your pages are really great. It remembers me a lot of things to me. Sniff !!
(France, september 1984)
