NAME  

6800

MANUFACTURER  

South West Technical Products Corporation

TYPE  

Professional Computer

ORIGIN  

U.S.A.

YEAR  

1975

END OF PRODUCTION 

1979

KEYBOARD  

Optional terminal

CPU  

Motorola 6800

SPEED  

980 KHz.

RAM  

4 KB min., depending on models

ROM  

8 KB

TEXT MODES 

Unknown

GRAPHIC MODES 

Unknown

COLORS  

Unknown

SOUND  

Unknown

SIZE / WEIGHT 

Unknown

I/O PORTS 

Serial and optional Parallel

OS  

ROM Monitor

POWER SUPPLY 

Integrated P.S.U.

PERIPHERALS  

S-50 and S-30 bus cards

PRICE  

$395 (Basic kit version)

 

SWTPC 6800

SWTPC 6800

 The SWTPC 6800 was the first computer system made by The SouthWest Technical Products Corporation, and the first based on the Motorola 6800 microprocessor. Before manufacturing computers, SWTPC sold home audio kits and a kind of computer terminal called "Television Typewriter".

The SWPTC 6800 was introduced in 1975. The first system included a SS-50 and SS-30 bus based


motherboard, a 6800 CPU card, a 2 KB static RAM card and a serial I/O card. User had to buy an additional terminal to enter information, and thus a ROM monitor allowed him to examine and modify memory, load/save programs on tape or boot from a floppy disc unit.

Every original card was built around the Motorola family chips, which made the SWTPC 6800 an inexpensive system for the time. The system was sold in a 2 KB kit version ($395) or 4 KB, 8 KB or 40 KB assembled versions. It came with a complete documentation including the 6800 programming manual and a program examples book.

The ROM and RAM was organized as follow: The MikBug chip (instant-on ROM BIOS) was 1024 bytes, of which 512 bytes were useable; MikBug let you write programs immediately in hex. The CPU board had a 2K bit RAM chip on it organized as 256 Bytes. The memory board included with the kit was 4K but it came with only 2K of RAM chips, 16 X 1024 bit.