This mini forum is intended to provide a simple means of discussion about the Cromemco  System I / II / III computer. If you want to share your own experience or memories, or add relevant information about this system: post a message!

My first job was with Cromemco (employee $58).
The Cromix system shared 16KB between the 8 banks of 64kB max memory, it had the OS. Bank 0 had ??kB memory and the whole OS, banks 1-8 had the user 64k with 16k disabled or 16kB memory cards offset to 16kB and higher. Also came out with a 48KZ memory card so that nothing was wasted.
Fast since a lot of stuff was Z80 assembly.
The real hot sw was the 32kB structured BASIC. It had everything and was all assembly, it was stuffed into 32kB of 2116 EPROMs! So fast the business apps were written using it as I remember. You could run interpeted or complie the code.
Oh, Cromemco also had the first C sw on a micro. I rememeber compiling a ''Hello'' program and it was an incredible 5kB!!! Talk about memory hog!! He he, the old days back when you counted Bytes...

I upgraded a Cromemco System III in the early 1980''s for NASA. It used the MP/M O/S. We supported 6 users at one time with 6 terminals and 5 printers scattered among the secretaries for the division. I believe it had two hard drives. I believe there were 7 64KB memory cards. Each of the 6 users had 62KB of RAM dedicated to them. Wordstar was used by each secretary for word processing. It is amazing to think back how one Z80 CPU at 4MHz could support 6 people at one time each running Wordstar.

Our Company used two Cromemco System IIIs and I bought an old Cromemco system personally. Both of the IIIs had twin 8" drives which eventually failed. We bought them in 1981/82 and kept them in use until about 1986/7 when we bought a Compaq 286 as a dedicated server (running Novell 2.0a.) with two Compaq PC/ATs as workstations running CP/M and MSDOS. The Cromemco systems had 4 16KB S100 ram boards and the other boards were processor, serial & parallel I/O & drive controller. Televideo terminals (monitors with attached keyboards) were used to interact with the system boxes. We ran CDOS (the Cromemco DOS) and CP/M as operating systems with Wordstar, Calcstar, Datastar and Supersort. I set up a rudimentary stock control and invoicing system using the application software. We also dabbled with an operating system called BOS and ran an accounting package under BOS. I also obtained a copy of Cromix which was a multiuser UNIX-like operating system but, without a hard disk, this was not very successful. I believe we still have the system boxes on a pallet at the back of our warehouse and at some stage (when I retire?) I'll try to get it all working.