🎄💾🗓️ Day 12: Retrocomputing Advent Calendar - Cromemco Z-1🎄💾🗓️

A different one today! Cromemco was founded in 1974 by Stanford Ph.D. students Harry Garland and Roger Melen to develop a series of peripherals for early microcomputers, such as the Cyclops digital camera and the Dazzler color graphics interface.

In 1976, they came out with their first full microcomputer, the Z-1, which used the same chassis as the IMSAI 8080 but fitted with a 4 MHz Zilog Z80 processor instead of the Intel 8080. The Z-1 was very flexible for the time, with 8 KB of static RAM and 22 S-100 bus expansion slots. This allowed the computer to immediately function upon power-up, without manually loading a boot program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle

Have first computer memories? Post’em up in the comments, or post yours on socialz’ and tag them #firstcomputer #retrocomputing – See you back here tomorrow!

Jerry Pournelle - Wikipedia

@adafruit I still have a stash of old printed Byte magazines, mostly because "Chaos Manor" was always such an entertaining read. #firstcomputer #retrocomputing
@plugh001 @adafruit
Didn’t save Byte. Did save all The Whole Earth Catalogs & 41 Whole Earth Reviews