As I said: Good Find!
Some of my fellow technicians in the 1970s bought KIM-1 6502-based processors to learn with. I had better financing and support from management, so I was able to purchase an Intel Microprocessor Development System to develop 8080 software. Later, after I graduated in 1978 with a BEE degree, I went to work for a small company that wanted me to develop a field-portable data acquisition system based on the 8085. Turns out they had an Intel MDS too, but if not, I would have ordered one.
I took over a partially finished upgrade of an existing system already in the field that used an audio tape recorder to record 110 baud acoustic modem tones, the so-called Kansas City Standard. They would spend a day recording digital data in the field on audio tapes using a modem, then play the tape back through an acoustical coupler for transmission to the "mother ship" in Beavercreek, OH, for analysis. This was all part of a "ground truth" program used to calibrate highly classified overhead imaging systems.
I worked on the ground truth part of it for several years before gaining the proper "tickets" to be "read in" to the overall program. Fascinating stuff, but once you learn about it, you live in fear of accidentally "spilling the beans" in idle conversation and going to prison for it. Well, at least I did. I didn't like knowing, and having to protect, those kinds of secrets. But the engineer who was designing the upgrade to their ground truth data acquisition system was faced with a dilemma: he could either divest his business interest in a small electronics company that did classified contract work for the Government, or he could leave the employ of the company I had just signed on to work for.
I didn't learn about his hard choice until after I was employed, whereupon I he told me that I was replacing him because he would not give up his interest in what was considered to be a competitor. Turns out, he had already selected an 8085 microprocessor system and a digital tape recorder to replace the TTL circuitry and analog audio recorder. Some hardware and software integration was still required, and that task was mine to complete. IIRC, it took about a year to get everything up and working, but I very much enjoyed learning about digital tape recording and how to interface the tape deck to the microprocessor. Once we got it deployed into the field, reliability of data transmissions to the mother ship was vastly improved.
Even with poor telephone lines, typical of cheap motel rooms located in the middle of nowhere, the transmission protocol allowed for error correction of data frames. Management was happy with it, but I didn't have the heart to tell them it was already obsolete. If management had their way, the data acquisition package would have been based on a Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputer... maybe a PDP-11/03 with a Winchester hard drive, a floppy drive, and an RT-11 real-time operating system. It would have been four times the volume and easily ten times the weight of what was eventually fielded in a custom-made, hermetically sealed, fiberglass backpack carrying about ten pounds of sealed lead-acid batteries for field power.
This was a DEC shop until the bitter end, but this Intel 8085 project provided a wedge that allowed me sell other Intel embedded microprocessor projects to management, including embedded IBM PCs, albeit with fierce resistance from the entrenched software weenies who wanted nothing to do with what they called "toy computers". Too bad for them, because my oldest son grew up learning how to write programs for Commodore 64 personal computers before moving on to "big iron" at Ohio State. And by the time he graduated from The Ohio State University with a EE degree, PCs were a done deal and you couldn't graduate without one. DEC went bankrupt and "out of business," but I had left the company that thought DEC would around forever long before that happened.
I understand many of my fellow employees migrated to another company that does classified contract work. That makes a lot of sense because acquiring security clearances is an expensive process. Unless you actively work for a company that requires your clearance, it becomes inactive. If enough time passes, and you fail to keep good records of what you did, where you did it, when you did it, and with who you did it, it is virtually impossible to re-instate your clearance because it is cheaper to hire a young person who has not as much history to examine. Employers pay for the cost of obtaining clearances for their employees, so they aren't exactly handed out like jelly beans.
I never really had time to learn about any of the other microprocessors that sprang up overnight in the 1970s. Things like the Zilog Z80, the Motorola 6800 and 68000, and dozens of others that enjoyed their fifteen minutes of fame before disappearing from the landscape. It was a heady time to be involved in microprocessors, and most of us had vision that upper-level management didn't have. But even being deeply involved doesn't mean you can see the forest for trees. I totally missed (and argued against) client-server based networked systems. In the beginning, everything on a client-server network was supposed to be a "dumb" terminal... just a mouse, keyboard, and monitor presented to the user. But PCs advanced so rapidly, and became so powerful and self-sufficient, that the client-server model didn't hold up very well. People wanted to do "other things" at their "terminal."
Then the Internet and Internet bandwidth exploded, allowing stuff that would previously execute on a PC to now execute on blade servers "in the cloud". Sure, you can afford a few terrabytes of local storage now, but how the heck are you gonna back it up? Having storage in "the cloud" moves responsibility for protecting that information from the end-user to the cloud server. So the wheel comes around again, and ideas that had traction in the 1990s have re-gained that traction by simply re-branding them as "cloud computing" instead of client-server networking. And nowhere is a "dumb terminal" to be seen.
If I were you, I would proudly display that training tool in a shadow box with an extension cord, and maybe breadboard a simple demo "circuit of the month" to show off to visiting firemen. It's nice to see that "ancient technology" has not been totally forgotten, and maybe still has a place in the 21st Century. Thank you for posting here.