The 480Z was sold mainly to the UK educational market as cassette-based system or as a diskless node which could be connected, via the proprietary CHAIN Network, to a Research Machines 380Z acting as a file server.

Early systems were supplied with a black sheet-metal case, however this was quickly replaced by a cream-coloured plastic housing.

[1] ROS 1.2 (see below) and later systems could be connected via a serial interface to an external single or dual 5¼-inch disk drive unit with a built-in double density Intelligent Disc Controller (IDC).

[6] The LINK 480Z supported a proprietary 800 kbit/s[1] CHAIN local area network that ran over a coaxial cable in a similar manner to 10BASE2 Ethernet.

[7] Using the built-in Z-Net firmware a diskless 480Z could be directly booted from a network file server (typically a Research Machines 380Z).

The monitor could be used to start BASIC from ROM, load application programs from cassette, or boot the operating system.

ROS also provided a software front panel allowing a display of registers and memory, and supporting breakpoints and single-stepping of machine code.

ROS provided a number of basic hardware control functions, such as keyboard input, writing text to the video memory and disk input/output.

Research Machines provided a full version of their BASIC interpreter as part of the standard firmware.

[11] There was also a version of MP/M which allowed multi-user access to a single disc unit shared among a small number of computers.

Research Machines also produced their own assembler (ZASM), text editor (TXED) and BASIC interpreter.