A Cromemco Z-2 that I assembled from a kit. It had a 21 slot backplane and a Z-80 microprocessor that could run at either 2 or 4 Mhz. I had a 7 channel Digital/Analog converter and a whopping 4K bytes of memory. That's 4096 bytes. I later added a 32K byte memory board that I assembled. I scrouged up a paper tape reader for the beastie and found a video card that looked very similar to a TRS-80. I got the source code to the TRS-80 for $10 in print form and typed the source code into our mainframe at work. I compiled the operating system and punched it to a 750 foot long mylar tape. Once I loaded this into my Cromemco, I could make it look like a TRS-80. I could even hook a cassette player up to one channel of my analog to digital converter and load TRS 80 games (like the original Flight Simulator). The best program that I wrote for the Cromemco was one which in realtime would do pitch shifting so that you could play an album (12 inch vinyl disc with grooves) at 45RPM and have the sound come out normal. Just faster. If you spoke into a microphone, you voice came out an octave lower. Really freaky. And only a few dozen lines of Z80 assembly language. I know because I had to enter the binary code every time that I wanted to run the program.
I later moved on to an Atari 800 and 850 with dual floppy drives. I had been playing with computers for many years before I finally bought my first PC. It was a PC clone with an 80286 processor that ran at 10Mhz.
We've come a long way in a short time.
BTW - I still have the Cromemco and Atari computers. I had to throw out my Hazeltine 1500 terminal when it finally died in the late 1980's. That hurt because I remember paying $1200 for it when it was brand new. I think that the 4K memory card cost $500. It pains me to think what I paid for the Cromemco kit.
