This IS the Laser you're looking for! Well, the VZ200 you're looking for.

A few months back, I posted about the Laser 50 that I had purchased on eBay. It showed up while I was looking for another Laser - the Laser 200, the beast with tan keys as nobody used to call it. At the time, the only example I was finding was the Dick Smith VZ200 Color Computer, and the only example that I could find was looking for bids in the $350 range.

Well, look what I got.

This did not cost me $350

It’s not large. In fact, it’s almost exactly the same width as an Apple wireless keyboard. A couple of inches longer from front to back, and significantly thicker obviously. Here are some other views.

This machine was definitely aiming for the budget end of the market, most probably targeted at would be ZX Spectrum buyers. It had color, and single-channel sound, just like the Spectrum, but also offered a power switch, and a monitor output, neither of which the Spectrum had.

The keyboard is more spacious than the Spectrum, but it achieves some of that by having narrower keys. Overall, I’d say the spacing between the keys justifies the loss of width. The keyboard is very busy with most keys having a couple of symbols printed on them, and additional commands above, and sometimes below. The best thing about the keyboard though is the key color. It’s a glorious tan color that’s neatly set off by the dark brown keyboard surround and off-white case. I’m not entirely sure who the color scheme was meant to appeal to, but I remember as a kid thinking it was a bit wank.

Although my VZ200 didn’t come in the original box, it came with a few bits and bobs.

Ah, the demo cassette. I remember loading all the demo programs on my Spectrum’s “Horizons” demo cassette, once, and then tossing it in a corner somewhere.

It also came with a very small user guide (6 pages including the front and back cover), a booklet of BASIC programs to type in, and an actually not bad BASIC manual.

Who knows what wonders await? I know. Fancy working out the area of a polygon or finding the root of a quadratic equation?

I don’t know how well the VZ200 did in Australia and New Zealand (Dick Smith was a kind of down under Alan Sugar), but I’m fairly sure the version released in the UK (the Texet T8000A) was a bit of a bomb. Frankly, it’s the sort of thing that would be a major letdown for the kid who asked for a computer for Christmas and was hoping for a Spectrum or a Vic-20. ( Before Christmas “Should we get him one of these Spectrums, luv?” “Nah, this one’s cheaper and these computers are all the same.”) (After Christmas, on the playground “Oi, wot computer did you get for Christmas”, “mumbles Texet T8000A mumbles”, “A fucking what?” - what can I tell you? Kids can be cruel.

One of the things that kinda screwed it from the start was the extremely mean 4KB of RAM. If only there was a way to expand the RAM…..