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>Until a few years back, I regularly used an old Cromemco System III computer that was built in 1979 Please don't take this as sneering -because I'm genuinely

>Until a few years back, I regularly used an old Cromemco System III computer that was built in 1979 Please don't take this as sneering -because I'm genuinely interested in late 70s micros!- but what did you use the system 3 for? Can you tell me about it as a computer? It's not a computer I know much about and I'm interested in what you would've used it for, especially recently.

JohnFen 7y ago
It was a z80-based CP/M machine. I got it as payment for a software project I did for someone. I used it for recreational/hobby activities. I forget the system clock speed, but I think it was around 2 MHz. The thing was made of steel, weighed over 100lbs, and contained 4 8-inch floppy drives (combined capacity for all four was about 2.5 megs, I think, but it may have been 5). The one I had contained an insane 512 megs of RAM. If I remember correctly, the one I had was purchased new for somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 (1979, which is about $35,000 today). This was, at the time, serious hardware. It even did high-resolution graphics that would (barely) still be considered high-resolution today. Turning it on literally made my lights dim momentarily and sounded like a jet engine spooling up. It was glorious. Nothing about it is practical in today's terms, of course. I had fun doing things like writing compilers and software to use it as the coordinator for a crazy project I was engaging in at the time: I had networked 10 Kaypro IIs together with it and was using the entire combined system as a single multi-CPU computing machine. What I mostly did with it, though, was to experiment with hardware. The System III was an S-100 bus machine, and did not even have a motherboard as we think of them these days. It had a backplane that you installed cards into to provide all functionality. This made it really fun and easy to experiment with changes that would, in a modern machine, have required altering the motherboard.

JohnFen 7y ago

It was a z80-based CP/M machine. I got it as payment for a software project I did for someone. I used it for recreational/hobby activities. I forget the system clock speed, but I think it was around 2 MHz. The thing was made of steel, weighed over 100lbs, and contained 4 8-inch floppy drives (combined capacity for all four was about 2.5 megs, I think, but it may have been 5). The one I had contained an insane 512 megs of RAM. If I remember correctly, the one I had was purchased new for somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 (1979, which is about $35,000 today). This was, at the time, serious hardware. It even did high-resolution graphics that would (barely) still be considered high-resolution today. Turning it on literally made my lights dim momentarily and sounded like a jet engine spooling up. It was glorious. Nothing about it is practical in today's terms, of course. I had fun doing things like writing compilers and software to use it as the coordinator for a crazy project I was engaging in at the time: I had networked 10 Kaypro IIs together with it and was using the entire combined system as a single multi-CPU computing machine. What I mostly did with it, though, was to experiment with hardware. The System III was an S-100 bus machine, and did not even have a motherboard as we think of them these days. It had a backplane that you installed cards into to provide all functionality. This made it really fun and easy to experiment with changes that would, in a modern machine, have required altering the motherboard.