NAME  

System I / II / III

MANUFACTURER  

Cromemco

TYPE  

Professional Computer

ORIGIN  

U.S.A.

YEAR  

1976

CPU  

Z80

RAM  

32 KB (up to 512 KB with a pagination mechanism)

ROM  

Unknown

TEXT MODES 

Unknown

GRAPHIC MODES 

754 x 482 monochrome / 377 x 241 16 colors. A special video card was available with 3 video processors, which allows the same resolutions but respectively with 8 and 4096 colors.

I/O PORTS 

8 bit ADC or DAC, Centronics, Disk controller, S100 Bus, 21-card-slot

BUILT IN MEDIA 

Varies according the model

OS  

CP/M

 

Cromemco System 1

System I / II / III


 CROMEMCO was founded in 1974 by two Stanford Students, Roger Melen and Harry Garland, who lived in the CROthers MEMorial Hall dormitory on the Stanford campus. Eventually CROMEMCO needed space to receive visitors, and moved out of the dorm to Mountain View, and incorporated in 1976. Early products were cards for the S-100 bus, as used by the Altair and IMSAI computers.


These computers were built around the S100 bus. The S100 BUS was a standard (also known under the name IEEE 696) for connection on Zilog Z80 or Intel 8080 processors. Many S100 cards were available for the Cromemco systems.

Four Cromemco systems were available:
- System 0: Z80 A + RAM 64 KB + 2 floppy disk drives (390 KB each),
- System I: As system 0 + 1 hard disk (5 MB).
- System III: Z80 CPU, Dual 8" Persci electrically driven floppy drives, 64 KB RAM. It was S-100 bus, Multi-user, used MP/M operating system. - In 1982, Cromemco introduced the CS-1H system using a dual processor board (Motorola 68000 and Z80) and offering 16 MB of address space.

For the moment, we do not know exactly the specific features for the Systems II and IV.

These systems ran under Cromix (the Cromenco UNIX version). They could run under CP/M and CDOS too (CDOS is a CP/M like operating system). Several languages were developed especially for these computers: Fortran IV or a 16 K Z80 Basic, which was given as "one of the fastest and most capable with full 14-digit precision".