Here is some history of how we got here. It all started with the chip in the corner, an Intel 4004. You'll see several old favorites here, The 8080, 8085, 6800, 2650. All the original memory chips are here 1702, 2708, 2764 ROMS, 2102, 2714, 4115, 4164 RAMS. There is the disk controller that made floppy disks a household name the 1771. The 8251 USART that made serial com usable. I wrote assembly language programs for every one of these chips and a lot more that aren't shown here. In the old days when we'd 'let the smoke out' of one we'd pop the top off to see what was inside.
This is the operating system that launched a revolution, CP/M 1.4. This is my original 8 inch floppy disk that I built my first 'home-brew' computer to run. It's a long story of how I got it, trust me, it's legend.
This is the last 'home-brew' computer I built in 1979. It was a 'full boat' machine, 16K boot ROM with debugger, 64K RAM, dual serial, dual floppy and ran CP/M 2.0. It sat in buried for 20 years and believe it or not in 2001 I found it. It had still had a disk drives and a boot disk so I powered it up and got
A:>_
