The Philips MasterLab from 1984 - A trainer powered by National Semiconductors's SC/MP III (INS8070)

The final video in my series of performance evaluations of (mostly W German) educational computers from the early 1980s - this time featuring the very rare Philips MasterLab MC6400! I don't know how many have been made, but probably not more than a few hundred or thousand. The machine has a INS8070 (SC/MP III from National Semiconductor) as its heart and is running at 4 Mhz. Spoiler alert: I measured 147,050 instructions per second (yes, 147 thousand!) - this makes the machine 1290 times faster than the Busch Microtronic, and about 79 times faster than the Kosmos CP1! Seems we have a clear winner here in terms of performance. Well, this wasn't entirely unexpected, given that this machine runs native SC/MP III machine code unlike the others which run an emulated, virtual machine code (hence, no emulation overhead).

[@MrWaalkman]

Very nice looking trainer. :)

[@vanhetgoor]

It is a good looking trainer, sharp and modern, and especially not cheap. Other trainers were made of a flimsy PCB with some vague components on it, wiggly switches that were attracted by dust and humid and thunderstrucks. This magnificent trainer keeps the components like in a showcase: dry, dust-free and isolated. This would even today look good in a laboratory. A student back then must have had a newpaper route for many years to afford this. Those who could get hold of it must have had a wonderful career.

[@michaelwessel4953]

yes, it's a really nice trainer, but a little too late (~ 1985), too pricey, uses this obscure CPU, and was indeed a bit too technical for kids and juveniles. Other kits (Kosmos CP1, Microtronic) were much more successful on the "STEM toys" market.

[@8-bitbitsa821]

Cool, very nice.
But, “National Semiconductor” not National Instrument tho 👍🏻

[@michaelwessel4953]

Thanks for that, of course... stupid mistake 😑