Jupiter Cantab's Jupiter Ace

One of the more obscure 8-bit British micros, the Jupiter Ace was released in 1982 for £89.95, and was built around the Z80 processor and the FORTH language. It never sold in large quantities, and despite retaining quite a few followers to this very day, the Jupiter Ace is rare.

You can still bid on one via this Jupiter Ace eBay auction though. The computer on offer is fully working, and seems to be in great cosmetic condition too. It is accompanied by the power supply unit, the RF lead, and a book on FORTH.

Seller ships to many places worldwide.

Scruffy and rare Jupiter Ace

Using Forth instead of BASIC and being all white in a era of black and beige 8-bit machines, the Jupiter Ace never really stood a chance. Not that it wasn't an interesting and cleverly designed micro, mind you, but those markets have always been too fickle. Anyway. For a chance to own one of these rare computers at a sensible price I suggest you have a look at this actually affordable Jupiter Ace eBay auction.

The micro is sadly scratched and looks pretty scruffy, but seems to be operating properly. It also comes with mains adapter, TV lead, cassette player cables, demo tape, manual and 6 tapes worth of games.

Seller ships to most of Europe, Australia, Russia, USA, Canada, Israel, New Zealand and Japan.

The entire Jupiter ACE project (including the brand itself) up for grabs!

So, first thing first, here's the link to the utterly impressive Jupiter Ace auction on eBay. And just to round things up, here's a link to to the official Jupiter Ace website, where you'll get all the details on what's on offer and see whether the £10,000 starting bid is something worth considering. 

Now, assuming you are either a museum, a historical society or a start-up with a mad plan and can afford such things, you'll have to know that the Jupiter Ace was a very ambitious and quite frankly brilliant 8-bit micro from the early '80s that failed to sell well and has become incredibly rare and collectible. Of note is the fact that the Ace's Sinclair-bred designers decided to use the much faster and more advanced Forth language instead of BASIC.

As for the auction itself, well, it'll get you all that is left from the company, including all rights and permissions to the Jupiter Ace brand, hardware and software. You'll also get all the original development tapes in the briefcase pictured above, another 90 tapes of masters and unpublished stuff, even more software filled tapes, a complete working Jupiter Ace with a 16k RAM pack, one 3k Jupiter Ace,  an empty case moulding, documents, games, promotional material and a ton more.

Seller ships worldwide.

[via Retro Collect]