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Microcomputers – The First Wave: Responding to Altair
[This post is part of “A Bicycle for the Mind.” The complete series can be found here.] Don Tarbell: A Life in Personal Computing In August 1968, Stephen Gray, sole proprietor of the Amateur Comput…
In June 1972, Tarbell had mastered enough of those skills to report to the ACS Newsletter that he (at last) had a working computer system, with an 8-bit processor built from integrated circuits, four-thousand bytes of memory, a text editor and a calculator program, a Teletype for input and output, and an eight-track-tape interface for long-term storage. IMSAI was board-compatible with MITS but made improvements that stood out to the connoisseur: a more efficient internal layout, a cleaner and more professional exterior, and a seriously beefed-up power supply that could support a case fully loaded with expansion boards. This was an odd pretense to put on while advertising in BYTE —a publication featuring articles such as “More to Blinking Lights than Meets the Eye” and “Save Money Using Mini Wire Wrap.” This is not to say that IMSAI (or its contemporaries) had no commercial customers or applications.
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