The MZ80K was Sharp's first foray into the muddy minefield of home computers. It featured the ubiquitous Z80 CPU (a Sharp branded one) and was pretty PET like in appearance, having a chiclet style keyboard, monitor and cassette deck all in it's quite attractive 2 tone case. Also like the PET it featured graphics characters on the keytops. Coming soon is the MZ80K review from Personal Computer World

Whilst repairing my MZ80A I needed a vertical deflect chip for the monitor board and it turned out the MZ80K had an identical one fitted. It only took half an hour to dismantle and remove the chip for testing and it worked fine. Trouble is this now meant the 80K needed one and the easily obtained modern replacement is half the height of the original. Various experiments and quick heat-dissipating calculations showed the new one ran much cooler than the original so I made an adapter for the heatsink. Looks pretty good!