Ever seen a Cromemco Cyclops in the wild?

Boris Gimbarzevsky boris at summitclinic.com
Tue Jun 9 17:53:03 CDT 2020


Funny how wetware memory works.  I have that issue of Popular 
Electronics somewhere in my collection and would have seen the 
article as I would read it cover to cover after it arrived in mail. 
While looking at the issue again, remembered reading next article on 
PLL's so probably read the Cyclops article, decided that $25 was way 
too much for one chip and never bothered.  However, I do have a lot 
of old RAM chips so might give it a try some day.  What I do recall 
about that era that a 1024 bit SRAM cost about $10 in Canada. (That 
was in days when we made a profit selling beer for $0.25 at TGIF).

Boris Gimbarzevsky

>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.
>
>Tim N3QE




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