The Cromemco Dazzler fit into the Altair 8800. The Altair hit 30 years
ago, the Dazzler not much later, and provided color graphics. A couple
of months after the Altair was on the cover of Popular Electronics,
the Cromemco Cylcops (Cromemco may not have been a company yet) was
in the magazine, a CCD camera that interfaced with the Altair. The
Altair was on the January 1975 issue, which came out in December. The
Cyclops may have been in the next issue, overlapping the second part of
the Altair article.
The PET and the Apple were downright late, unless one is going by the
title of "PC"; it had been a generic term before the IBM PC came along.
And of course, the concept predates the Altair. ALan Kay described a
"personal computer" when at Xerox Parc even if it was never implemented
at that point. And the Xerox Alto (or was it Altos?) was a single-user
computer, bringing in many of the things that later became common, even if it
never made it to a commercial product.
The Scelbi 8H, 8008/14KB, was pre-1975; I remember because I was still in
the USAF when I got mine, and I got out in 1976. Maybe even as early as
'72 or '73. I traded a guy my Heathkit IO-10 for it. I had just assembled
the scope, and hadn't tracked down all of my errors yet (i.e., it didn't
operate yet), but this guy was tired of the 8H because I/O was 8 toggle
switches, 3 un-debounced buttons labeled "interrupt" "step" and I forget
the others. And about 20 LEDs - address/data bus, high address bus, and
processor status lines. To get a program into it, you had to "jam" it in,
by putting the opcode on the toggle switches, pressing "interrupt," which
made it fetch the byte off the switches and get ready to execute it -
"step" would make it either execute the instruction if it was a one-byte
instruction, or make it read the next byte of the instruction off the
toggle switches, and _then_ execute it - for most instructions, you had to
press "step" multiple times - it wasn't an _instruction_ step, it was a
_machine_ step. He found it to be enough of a pain in the ass that he was
willing to trade a perfectly good computer for a busted scope. Of course,
to me, it was like I was home, i.e. "Please don't throw me in that briar
patch!" I like to see what my electronics are doing. ;-)
Cheers!
Rich
Cheers!
Rich
