[Adrian Black]’s enthusiasm is palpable as he shows off something truly unusual: a Lobo MAX-80 computer from 1982. To call this machine rare would be an understatement, as the company folded soon after its release. The one shown here is the first one [Adrian] has ever seen, never mind that he had never even heard of it before.
Aggressively priced and only around for a short time, it’s unknown how many were actually built.
The MAX-80 was a Z80-based computer that was CP/M and LDOS compatible. As [Adrian] puts it, many companies and innovative products came and went during this time period. There was so much, and most of it has simply disappeared.
He was able to find information about the Lobo MAX-80 from advertisements, media coverage, reviews, and more (and he has thoughtfully uploaded everything, see the video description for links) and even pieced together a short history of a company that got its start making TRS-80 and Apple II disk drives before transitioning to producing their own machine. The MAX-80 was released in 1982, but sadly the company didn’t last much longer.
After sharing what history he was able to dig up, [Adrian] opens the unit he has and goes through diagnostics. It’s actually in remarkably good shape, and he’s eventually able to get it to actually boot into CP/M.
There’s still more work needed before he can put it through its paces, but getting a formerly completely unknown machine from the 80s operational is pretty wild. Watch the whole thing in the video below.