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Cromemco Z-2D

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46 pointstodsacerdoti12 comments

I had a Cromemco Dazzler (still have it). Nifty graphics board for the S-100 bus. Uses DMA off system memory. Here are some links to further info. (PDF's)

Manual: https://www.quaxio.com/files/2020/kaleidoscope_part1/cromemc...

Someone cloned one: https://www.worldphaco.com/uploads/THE_WORLD_FAMOUS_CROMEMCO...

We really need ways to preserve these artifacts for longer. It kills me to see pre-PC computers having been recycled.

I feel conflicted - preservation is a worthy effort indeed, but space is a problem. I barely have space for my current stuff, and most of my non-laptops are Computers of Theseus as it is. The only thing my family ever had that was "historically significant" was an Apple II, now long gone.

For most of us, the more pressing concern is data preservation. It's a crying shame that tape drives are so expensive, given the dirt-cheap-per-gigabyte media. About the only thing I can afford to use as a backup medium is hard drives and ZFS.

The clown, er, cloud is not an option. Between the issues of trusting third parties, the speed of data transfer, and the potential cost of data transfer, I'm just going to say no.

I don't care that much for the Computers of Theseus - we keep them working in whatever way we can. And indeed, past the IBM PC's explosion, there aren't many significant computers or that are actually unique - Macs, UNIX workstations, that Unisys ISA board that has an A-series mainframe on it, IBM's counterpart (with a 370) and a few others that earn a place in history by some unique design or historical accident.

And data. I'm thinking about BD archive, but most of the time it's local hard disks with BtrFS or ZFS with snapshots stored in Amazon Glacier and other similar services.

Wild how they expected the user to sit there for hours soldering and measuring dozens of little resisters and other components. Thank god for high-speed pick and place robots, the amount of human toil and tedium avoided cumulatively is astounding.

The hobbyist paved the way. It was like knitting in a way, but with molten metal and wisps of smoke. Cathartic sometimes.

Oh I did it! Countless solder joints. Used a plastic gizmo to bend the resistors to match the PCB holes. But these were "hobbyist" computers. No long term effect from the lead in the solder solder solder solder .. "-)

1977: Loading your programs and files will take you only a few seconds

Can't wait until computers become so powerful we can finally have this!

cries

You could turn on a TRS-80 and get a prompt _immediately_. The faster the computer, the fatter the software. More functionality too, but depends on what your goal is.

I know. My ZX Spectrum went from 100% off to BASIC "repl" in about a second :-/

Each Diskette will store up to 92kb

A group at my fathers university bought a system, the liked it so they bought another, four floppies, four hard disks, for both systems. The company could not believe it. The called to confirm the order, they wanted to know why they needed to have so much storage: Image processing for MRI. Cremenco for the win, turned out to be extremely reliable.

They complained about the 92k disks, so I got them a notcher. They took me out for a wild night of drinking.

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