10 Facts About Jupiter Ace

Jupiter Ace by Jupiter Cantab was a British home computer of the early 1980s.

The Jupiter Ace differed from other microcomputers of the time in that its programming environment used Forth instead of the more popular BASIC.

Jupiter Ace Cantab was formed by Richard Altwasser and Steven Vickers.

Jupiter Ace was named after an early British computer, the Pilot ACE.

Jupiter Ace is often compared with ZX81 due to its similar size, low cost, and similar form factor.

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Internally its design is more similar to the ZX Spectrum although the Jupiter Ace had a dedicated video memory of 2 KB, partly avoiding the slow down when programs accessed the same bank as the video memory.

Jupiter Ace was based on the Zilog Z80, which the designers had previous experience of from working on the Sinclair ZX81 and ZX Spectrum.

Jupiter Ace had an 8 KB ROM containing the Forth kernel and operating system, and the predefined dictionary of Forth words in about 5 KB.

The Jupiter Ace's Forth was stated to be "ten times faster than Basic" and used less than half the memory of an equivalent program written in interpreted BASIC.

Jupiter Ace's Forth was based mostly on Forth-79, with some relevant differences, in particular it added syntax checking to control structures and definer constructions and a few extra words were added based on common BASIC sound, video and tape commands.