Uploaded November 2023 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
I finally got my hands on an Olivetti M20 computer, this one came all the way from France! I've been looking for an M20 ever since I did the Z8000 clover computer project a few years ago. The Olivetti M20 computer seem to have been particularly popular in Europe, and were designed and manufactured in Italy. The typical M20 has two floppy drives, each either 320KB or 640KB in size. Some may have had optional hard drives. 128 KB of memory was stock, which could be raised to up to 512 KB by adding a total of three add-on memory cards. The CPU is the Zilog Z-8000 16-bit CPU. In this video, I upgrade the RAM from 128KB to 512KB, add a compactflash adapter, design a speech synthesizer, design a USB adapter, play zork and encounter a troll, try out the 8086 Alternate Processor Board (APB), and program things in Forth. For more vintage computer videos, see smbaker.com
I finally got my hands on an Olivetti M20 computer, this one came all the way from France! I've been looking for an M20 ever since I did the Z8000 clover computer project a few years ago. The Olivetti M20 computer seem to have been particularly popular in Europe, and were designed and manufactured in Italy. The typical M20 has two floppy drives, each either 320KB or 640KB in size. Some may have had optional hard drives. 128 KB of memory was stock, which could be raised to up to 512 KB by adding a total of three add-on memory cards. The CPU is the Zilog Z-8000 16-bit CPU. In this video, I upgrade the RAM from 128KB to 512KB, add a compactflash adapter, design a speech synthesizer, design a USB adapter, play zork and encounter a troll, try out the 8086 Alternate Processor Board (APB), and program things in Forth. For more vintage computer videos, see smbaker.com
