When I moved back to Ottawa in April 1976 to take a job at Carelton University’s Computer Center, I was already fascinated at the prospect of actually owning a computer. There were a very few computer “kits” on the market already, including the Altair and Imsai.
Having no significant expenses, I decided to splurge and purchase the IMSAI 8080 — and have the kit assembled for me at extra cost. Although called the “8080” after the Intel processor, a newer processor called the “Z80” had recently emerged and was not only compatible, but much more powerful. Of course I ordered mine to be built using the Z80.
Initially this was a personal experiment. I was interested to see what these new “personal” computers could amount to. Admittedly, although I saw great potential, I felt that their time had not yet arrived.
My system consisted of the processor, a whopping 40KB of memory, a single floppy disk drive, a CRT monitor (made for security systems) and a keyboard (which was not enclosed in a case, just the raw circuit board on a piece of bubble-wrap.
Programming was done either in machine code by entering steps via the front panel switches, or using a very simple BASIC programming language that was then available.
Although I didn’t do much with it other than experiment, I did write a demo calendar program that displayed a month calendar on the screen for any year… and the demo could be run so that the months progressed automatically. I offered the program to the store that I purchased the computer from, and they actually had it running in their window for a while!
One day I got a call from the Ottawa Citizen newspaper asking if they could send up a team to interview me. Seems they wanted to do a story on this new “home computer” phenomenon, and the store told them that I had one of the most powerful systems in the city!
The photos are not of my actual system which sadly I junked when we moved to Chicago in 1993, but they are of the exact system I had. The original newspaper article is also below.
The photo of the only remaining original memory card from that system IS real. That board measures about 10″ wide and 1/4″ thick and contains 16 KB (16,000 bytes) storage. Contrast that to today’s fingertip-sized micro-SD cards in your phones… As an example I gave to my classes: It would take 1 million of these cards to match the capacity of a 16 GB micro-SD. Placed end-to-end, those cards would stretch about 144 MILES. Stacked, they could make a pile almost 4 MILES high! Not to mention that these 16KB cards cost about $100 each, so 1 million cards would cost $100 million!
And today 16GB is a very small SD card, with capacities approaching the TERABYTE range!
