1980s Vintage Computers
Cromemco Z-2D
This large box introduced in 1979 was a well engineered example of a typical S-100 bus machine the CP/M era. It is built in a strong steel case with a high-current power supply feeding a 21-slot bus. However this is rather a waste as this particular machine only had 4 cards! As they were so well built a lot have survived to the present day so they are quite common. I was lucky in that I was given this machine together with an ADM-3A terminal and Anadex printer, I have subsequently sold the main unit and the terminal..
My System Two machine had four cards, all made by Cromemco and all in good condition.
- Cromemco ZPU containing a Z80 processor.
- Cromemco 64KZ memory card containing 64KB of RAM (bank switchable).
- Cromemco PRI providing two parallel ports.
- Cromemco 4FDC floppy disk controller. This also contains the RDOS boot EPROM, which has some basic monitor commands, and a serial port for a terminal.
I was kindly sent a CDOS disk for this machine by a fellow collector in the UK. However I was not successful in finding a CP/M disk, the key requirement is that it runs on a 4FDC card (an image file is available for the 16FDC version).
Links
Cromemco machines have been popular with collectors, and there are several sites that feature them:
Various Cromemco systems and manuals at Daves Old Computers
This page was last revised on: 16/06/12