Equinox/Parasitic Advert - October 1977

The Equinox 100 was a Zilog Z80 or Intel 8080-based system with an industry-standard S-100 bus - the most popular bus standard of the day.

It was built by Parasitic Engineering of Albany, California, which had started out as a supplier of "debugging kits" for the Altair 8800. These were upgrade kits for the Altair's power supply and to reduce noise on its S-100 bus.

In early 1978 it was estimated that there were more than fifty manufacturers in the US producing all sorts of upgrades and plug-in cards for S-100 systems, from extra memory to laboratory interfaces and speech synthesizers.

The Equinox was launched in the UK at the Mini-Micro exhibition in early 1978, held at the US Government Trade Centre in London. The complete micro - including 32K RAM and dual floppy disks - retailed for just under £3,000, which is about £20,900 in 2024.

Previously available in the US as a "mainframe kit" for $799 - about £4,360 in 2024, the built version of the Equinox used the WünderBuss motherboard, designed by well-known electronics engineer George Morrow^[1]. Morrow also had a hand in the design of the actual Equinox 100 micro itself.

An advert for George Morrow's WünderBuss, from Morrow's Micro-Stuff, and sold via the Thinker Toys brand. From Byte, July 1977

George Morrow would later set up Morrow Designs, which produced the Decision series of micros in 1982.