Very cool history! I'm working on one at this very moment. The BYT-8 CPU board is a very good 8080 board, with built in vector interrupt controller. I think a few of you bought up those blank BYT-8 CPU boards I found a few years ago and built them up. I've got one of their front panel boards, also a very nice design, much more stable than the Altair front panel, but I don't have a dress panel for it. Apparently a fair number of people at the Los Gatos labs had S-100 systems of their own. IBM was apparently even using IMSAIs themselves as part of their testing process for some of the ICs they were working on there. They couldn't find fast/reliable/dense enough S-100 RAM boards on the market at the time, so they made their own...using IBM FSU RAM chips! I've got three of the boards, and a story from their previous owner: http://www.glitchwrks.com/2016/01/20/fsu-ram Thanks, Jonathan On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 8:56 PM, Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I know a few people on our list have Byte Shop Byt-8 computers. I happened to be emailing with store owner Paul Terrell recently. I asked him who did the system design, and thought some of you would be interested in his response: "My next door neighbor in San Jose was a design engineer for IBM at their Los Gatos Labs and he did the design work for the Byte 8 CPU card and front panel board with the led lights and switches and one uped the Altair front panel with some extra debug features. He transferred to their Tuscon office and I heard he had passed away."
________________________________ Evan Koblentz, director Vintage Computer Federation a 501(c)(3) educational non-profit
evan@vcfed.org (646) 546-9999
www.vcfed.org facebook.com/vcfederation twitter.com/vcfederation instagram.com/vcfederation