 The Sol
Computer was developed by Bob Marsh, Lee Felsenstein and Gordon
French. Bob founded his company, Processor Technology, in April 1975
making 4K RAM memory boards for the Altair (cause MITS couldn't make a
working memory board)
In June 1975, Bob and Les Solomon (technical editor of Popular
Electronics) dreamed up the Sol-20 computer, Bob had a bunch of cheap
walnut that he originally indented to use in a digital clock, he
didn't want it to go to waste and used it in the Sol-20 (see picture).
About 10,000 of them were produced, some as kits, some as pre-builts.
Based on the Intel 8080 microprocessor, this machine occupies a
special niche in computer history for technical and aesthetic reasons.
It was one of the earliest to include a keyboard interface and support
circuitry for full implementation of every 8080 function. It was a
pioneer towards modern video output boards by having a design that
actually put up alphanumeric characters on the screen, using a form of
distributed processing that didn't lean on the CPU for all processing.
There were several models of the SOL-20 system. / 20
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