Ever seen a Cromemco Cyclops in the wild?

[Brent Hilpert]

On 2020-Jun-09, at 6:21 AM, Shoppa, Tim via cctalk wrote:
> I think a Stanford AI lab has one in a display case. Any others out there?
> 
> It was supposedly "commercial" but I don't even remember ever seeing an ad for the Cyclops from Cromemco and I had a really good stash of Cromemco literature and hardware.
> 
> I do remember the BYTE article where you pop the top off of a DRAM chip to make a Camera but that was 1983-ish, nearly a decade after the Cromemco Cyclops was supposedly "commercial". In the discussions I had in the 80's none of us seemed to know about the Cromemco Cyclops having preceded it.



As a teenager, I assembled a Cyclops from kit in 1977. An EE friend of my dad had an IMSAI for which I had been
assembling boards back to at least mid '76. He obtained the Cyclops and the S100 interface board for it,
and I assembled them. This was the model in a small blue diecast Al case with a lens on one end,
internally there were 3-4 little boards that slid into board slots formed in the Al case.

When I took the assembled units back to the friend and IMSAI and we tried it out, it didn't work.
So I went home and constructed from scratch the oscilloscope interface (7 or 8 ICs) for the camera
that could allow it to be used and tested without the added complexity of the S100 interface, computer, software, etc.
The schematic for that was included in the Cyclops documentation. I still have the mylar-&-stick-on-graphics artwork
I made up to produce the PCB for it, which I just confirmed the '77 date from.

I never saw it produce an image though, the stuff was left with the EE friend and I don't know whether he was
eventually successful with it or not.