Cromemco

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cromemco was a Mountain View, California microcomputer company that began as a partnership in 1974 between Harry Garland and Roger Melen, two Stanford PhD students. The name comes from their residence at Stanford University, Cro(thers) Mem(orial) (Stanford Dormitory). The company was incorporated in 1976.

Their initial products used the Zilog Z80 microprocessor and the S-100 bus. The Z-1, released in August 1976, was a Z-80 development system on a heavy-duty IMSAI 8080 22-slot chassis. It included 8 kB (KiB) of static RAM, an RS-232 serial port, and a PROM programmer, and sold for $2495. Its modular design supported a 4 MHz Z-80 plug-in card ($395) and 4 kB static RAM cards ($295). The 1978 Z-2 line was an updated S-100 computer sold as modules or a complete system. The Z-2 was available with one 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive and no RAM for $1995 or as the complete System Two (CS-2) with 64 kB RAM and two floppy drives for $3990. The Z-2 was the first commercially marketed microcomputer certified by the U.S. Navy for use aboard ships without major modification and some were used aboard Ohio class submarines for data logging during tests. The System Three (CS-3) was the "professional" version of the System Two with two 8 inch floppy drives standard instead of 5 1/4 inch drives, and 32 kB RAM for $5990.

The Cromemco 3101 serial display terminal was a rebranded Beehive Medical Electronics B-100 terminal.

The System Two and System Three were sold to educational establishments across Europe and China. These sales helped the company to fund the transition to 16-bit systems with Motorola MC68000 processors during 1981. The System 1 followed the System Two and System Three. It contained either dual 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, or one floppy and a 5 MB hard disk, and was available with a dual processor "DPU" card which contained both Z-80 and MC 68000 processors. A ruggedized version of the MC68000 computer with removable hard disk cartridges was widely deployed by the USAF as part of the USAF Mission Support System (MSS) for F-16, F-15 and other aircraft. The MSS provided pilots key navigational and other data during missions and enabled combat pilots to compare mission effectiveness to flight plan data during the subsequent debriefing by their superiors.

The C-10 personal computer was introduced in June, 1982. It was a 4 MHz Z80 system featuring 64 KiB RAM with an 80 character x 25 line video screen for US$1785.

Cromemco produced the graphical microcomputers used by many television stations for weather forecasts during the mid to late 1980s. These Colorgraphics Systems were used on the evening news programs to replace the transparent acrylic glasss maps on which local weathermen formerly drew weather symbols by hand. The computers used an enhanced version of Cromemco's popular Dazzler color graphics card.

The Z80 based systems ran either CDOS (Cromemco Disk Operating System) or CP/M.

Multi-user capability, via their own Cromix operating system based on Unix, was offered from 1979 onwards. Cromix was witten in the C programming language to run on an 8 bit Z-80 processor. It included many of the properties of the Unix operating system which typically requred a sixteen bit processor with a hardware memory mapper (that the Z-80 did not provide). The Z-80 processor was able to utilize up to 16 banks of 64 MB of RAM to support 1 MB multi user and multitasking applications. It was possible to run this efficient operating system using only a floppy disk drive (no hard disk) and that distinguished it from other operating systems of the time based on Unix which required large expensive hard drives. Roy Harrington was the lead designer of the Cromix development team.

The company employed, at its peak in 1983, more than 500 people and had annual revenues of US$55 million. It was wholly owned by Garland and Melen until it was sold to Dynatech in 1987 as a supplier to their subsidiary Colorgraphics Weather Systems. The European division of Cromemco reorganized as Cromemco AG and is still in business.