17 Facts About Cromemco

Cromemco was a Mountain View, California microcomputer company known for its high-end Z80-based S-100 bus computers and peripherals in the early days of the personal computer revolution.

Cromemco was named for their residence at Stanford University.

Collaboration that was to become Cromemco began in 1970 when Harry Garland and Roger Melen, graduate students at Stanford University, began working on a series of articles for Popular Electronics magazine.

Cromemco called themselves “Specialists in Computer Peripherals” and had a reputation for innovative designs and quality construction.

Cromemco re-packaged their systems to produce the System One, followed by the larger System Two and System Three.

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CROMIX, initially ran on the System Three and would later run on Cromemco systems using the Motorola 68000 series of microprocessors.

In 1982, Cromemco introduced a Motorola 68000 CPU card for their systems.

Cromemco introduced the C-10 personal computer in 1982, a Z-80 floppy disk based system for the low end of the market.

Cromemco was wholly owned by Garland and Melen until it was sold to Dynatech Corporation in 1987.

Cromemco was known for its engineering excellence, design creativity, and outstanding system reliability.

Cromemco drew on engineering talent from Stanford University, the Homebrew Computer Club, and even its own distributors.

Several Cromemco engineers went on to found other Silicon Valley companies.

From a field of 149 microcomputers the Final Technical Report concluded that “the equipment offered by Cromemco is the most responsive to the general selection criteria.

Cromemco developed a special version of the CS-200 computer to meet the requirements of the Air Force's Mission Support System.

Cromemco systems were widely used in commercial applications, including at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange where a bank of 60 Cromemco Z-2 systems were used to process trades.

Cromemco computers were the first microcomputer systems widely distributed in China.

Cromemco systems were broadly adopted by US television stations for generating weather and art graphics, using software developed by ColorGraphics Weather Systems.