Cromemco Advert - January 1983
From Byte - The Small Systems Journal
What Cromemco computer card capability can do for you
According to the advert - which like Clenlo's advert of 1982 gives a nice insight into what a microcomputer "bus" actually does - Cromemco offered one of the most complete lines of computer cards in the industry.
That's perhaps more significant as 1983 was the year that the S-100 bus standard - first introduced back at the very beginning of 1975 as the Altair Bus - was finally ratified to become the official standard IEEE 696-1983.
Cromemco's 512 MSU plug-in S-100 board, with no fewer than 88 memory chips required to make up the 512K. Adapted from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Whilst many S-100 microcomputers of the era had sometimes up to 21 slots internally, Cromemco is also taking things a stage further with its 21-slot card cages - external S-100 bus extenders, using a PS8 power supply to feed it.
With single-board Z80A plug-in computers, a Motorola 68000 and Z80 dual-processor unit, at least eleven different types of memory board from the 4K 4KZ up to the 512K MSU - a board which needed the MCU memory control unit to manage it - plus disk interfaces, analog to digital converters, printer interfaces, parallel ports, intelligent multi-port serial and parallel connectors, high-resolution graphics boards, and even Cromemco's own network interface - C-Net - this probably was "peak S-100".
Date created: 22 February 2026
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