Built an 8080 barebones system in 1979 (or maybe 1980). Wirewrapped on old 44-pin Vector boards that I redrilled by hand for the DIP sockets. Initially 1K RAM, one 1702A EPROM, one parallel I/O port, an EBCDIC keyboard from some piece of IBM gear, and a switches/lights front panel. Video from a SSM VB-1B S-100 card to a surplus 9" CCTV monitor. I keyed in WADUZITDO by hand once or twice... that's a neat programming language in just 256 bytes. Eventually I sold the VB-1B card and moved on to bigger and better microcomputers ;)
Last year I pulled it out from under the bench and upgraded it to a serial interface (for my ADM-3 Dumb Terminal), added a 2716 and an updated monitor program. I think I'll add WADUZITDO in the "huge" ROM space :) On 11/24/25 21:38, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote: > Here's one: Cramer Intel 8080A Microcomputer > https://vintagecomputer.net/browse_thread.cfm?id=819 > Wire-wrapped 8080 system built to compete in the Altair market, and flopped. > > " Cramer Electronics Incorporated started advertising this 8080 kit > microcomputer, the "Cramerkit", in late 1975 for $495 (or was it $1495?) > but none were delivered until the spring of 1976. The Cramerkit was > designed by Microcomputer Technique Inc. and was shipped partially > assembled. " > > On Mon, Nov 24, 2025 at 10:04 PM Jon Elson via cctalk <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> On 11/23/25 22:13, ben via cctalk wrote: >>> Who has strange or one of a kind computers out there? >>> I have a 18 bit homebrew (cpld) with 256Kb ram and just a >>> bootstrap loader. >>> >> I built a 32-bit bit slice processor out of AMD 2903 and >> 2910 parts. See: >> >> https://pico-systems.com/stories/1982.html >> >> I did write a micro assembler for it and ran a few test >> programs. But, the work ahead of me (interfacing memory and >> an I/O bus, writing 360 microcode and coming up with a >> Pascal compiler and writing my own OS and editor, etc. was >> just too daunting and I gave up on it. >> >> Jon >>
