The original Microbee computer was designed in Australia by a team including Owen Hill[1] and Matthew Starr.

The MicroBee's most distinctive features are its user configurable video display (capable of mimicking the displays of other computers and devices including the TRS-80, Sorcerer and SOL20 with later colour and graphic models 40 and 80 column terminals, Super-80, ZX Spectrum, early arcade machines, Amstrad CPC 464) and its battery backed non-volatile RAM and small size allowing it to be powered off, transported, and powered back on and resume activities on the currently loaded program or document.

The StarNet uses a single star topology using dedicated 8-bit parallel data bus connections between the central hub and its remote spokes.

The microbee was the integration, simplification and modernisation of the following S-100 cards sold by Applied Technology, Microworld BASIC and DGOS Monitor for their System Z.A.T.

The removal of the S-100 bus support and configuration hardware and some other features made the microbee much simpler and cheaper than its ancestors.

Examples: The utilisation of higher density memory devices made also the microbee smaller.

The original machines were supplied with 16 or 32 kB of static RAM, and stored programs on cassette, using 300 or 1200 Baud encoding.

An advertisement for a "special introductory offer" with an asking price of A$275 appeared in the December 1983 issue of Electronics Today International magazine.

16 kB PCG RAM was sufficient to allow full 512 × 256 bit mapped displays with a limited colour palette.

These machines were typically sold with dual-floppy drives (or a 10 MB 'Winchester' disc) held in a monitor stand that connected to the main unit.

This increased the memory to 256 kB of dynamic RAM and had a new keyboard with numeric keypad.

An advanced next generation model code named "Gamma", based on the Motorola 68010 and two Zilog Z80 processors, was designed but never made it to the market.

It had dual-processor architecture, with some enhancements such as floppy emulation of the SD memory card.