[6] The 380Z was packaged in a large, black, 19-inch rack-mount, rectangular metal case containing the power supply, a number of printed circuit boards and the optional 5¼-inch floppy disk drives.

Early versions were contained in a light blue metal case with a white front and had only a cassette interface or 8-inch floppy drives; only a small number of these were made.

An optional 8-bit ASCII paper tape punch/reader was also used, as this was a common storage medium at the time - where previous use of a computer had been limited to a teletype machine connected to mainframe by telephone.

The system used a passive bus architecture with no motherboard – all electronics were contained on a number of cards interconnected by ribbon cable.

[2] COS 3.4 (see below) and earlier systems came with a basic video card providing a 40×24 text-only monochrome display.

In addition to the text-mode video card the system could be enhanced with a high-resolution graphics (HRG) board.

The monitor could be used to load application programs, such as BASIC, from cassette or to boot the disk operating system.

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

[16] COS provided a number of basic hardware control functions, such as keyboard input, writing text to the video card and disk input/output.

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

Brian Reffin Smith, then at the Royal College of Art in London, wrote 'Jackson', one of the first digital painting programs, which ran on the 380Z and which was distributed across UK schools.