M9900 CPU Brochure March 1978

When we introduced the M9900 CPU at the Second West Coast Computer Faire in March 1978, the machine was running on an M9900 CPU board from the first pilot run of boards from the printed circuit manufacturer. We hadn't yet received the first production run of boards, nor stocked up on inventory to populate them, so we weren't yet ready to take orders from customers. The software was well along, with the operating system, basic development software (editor, assembler, linker, and debugger), Basic, and Pascal all ready to demonstrate at the show. This is the brochure we handed out to visitors to our booth at the show.

The document has not yellowed with age. It was printed on paper intended to match the colour of Marinchip's stationery. We paid to have this typeset from copy I wrote.

In “The Future” mention is made of a 16K byte 16-bit wide RAM board. This was a planned static RAM which would take advantage of the M9900 CPU's 16 bit data transfer mode and run three times faster than 8-bit S-100 memory. Plans for this board were eventually shelved and replaced with the M9900 64K board which used dynamic RAM chips to populate the entire address space of the CPU on one board and allowed bank switching to extend memory capacity beyond 64K. The “text processing system” was WORD [PDF], released later in 1978.

by John Walker December, 2017 Fourmilab Home Page