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This seems, at least for my purposes (electronics bench experimental control), to be an ideal card. Does anyone have any experience with it? Is it suitable to be used in the 8800c?

Your question hasn't resulted in a ton of replies!

I'm new to the forum, but back in the day, aka 1980s, I worked with a ton of these, although in Cromemco systems. I do still own one, so if I can get my Altair 8800c assembled and working maybe I can test it out to see if it indeed works.

A trivia question: Where did the name Cromemco come from?

Crothers Memorial Company.

Thanks for your reply and I look forward to your test!

As I remember it, and that could faulty, the Crothers Memorial Hall was the name of the dormitory that Harry Garland and Roger Melen resided in at Stanford. Am I too far off base?

Once when Harry Garland was visiting the dealer here in Georgia where I worked, he asked what was the major issue we were facing with Cromemco products. I replied, only one! We can't seem to get a 64K memory board that works reliably! He then told us to do something to destroy the ones we had that were causing us such headaches and he would sign a letter to accompany them on their return to Cromemco to be replaced. When I asked if he cared how we destroyed them, he responded, any way you wish. I took the 5 boards we had in our shop that refused to work, even though several had been returned to Cromemco on multiple occasions, out behind our shop where there was a big hill, propped them up in the dirt, grabbed a 30-06 rifle from my truck (it was hunting season) and starting filling the cards with holes! Harry even took a couple of shots himself as I remember it. The boards were replaced with a newer version that worked! I think I may even have one of those myself!

As for me getting my 8800c put together, that might not be real soon. On our test bench I usually tested IO through the 1488 and 1489 RS-232 driver chips, which seemed to have a real high failure rate if there were any nearby lightening strikes. We had one customer that had a multi-user Cromix system that had 4 TU-ART boards that took a hit on their radio tower. When they called they said all users were unable to get into the system. Upon arrival and inspection I discovered every 1488 and 1489 on the 4 boards had holes blown in them. After replacing all the 1488 and 1489 chips that had let the smoke out, they were back in business. We always kept a good supply of them in our stock.

Enough war stories! Guess I should get busy getting to the 8800c.