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PolyMorphic Systems - History
Polymorphic Systems were one of the early S-100 companies. The competed with Altair, IMSAI and the Sol. They were located on Ward Drive in Santa Barbara CA.   The came out initially with the Poly-88 or the "orange toaster" (nicknamed because the boards generated a lot of heat inside the small orange chassis box with no fan).  This box could only hold five S-100 boards and no disk drives.  It was a cassette based data storage system.
 
Later (1977), PolyMorphic came out with their System 8813.  This had 1,2 or 3 5" floppy disk drives  housed in a "NorthStar like" metal and wood cabinet along with a BASIC language interpreter.  It should be noted that they had their own BASIC that was said to be better than MS BASIC in several ways at the time.  Soon respectable business applications started to appear.  Over time programmers could choose from BASIC, FORTRAN, Forth, or assembly language for the system.  The system was only a 2 MHz 8080 CPU, (actually it ran at 1.8432 MHz so that it could be easily divided to produce standard baud rate clocks). The Poly used 5" 10-sector (hard) 35 track disks. The discs came originaly with 350 single density sectors, single sided, later a double density disk was added.  They also had an external 8" disk.

  System 8813

Sirhous Parsei was the controller of Polymorphics when it folded.  He lbecame the owner of the company and managed support for users.   Mark MacLin was the principal design and support engineer.  Mark now (2114), works for Microsoft

The manual for the Systems Cassette Board can be obtained here.

 
PolyMorphic Systems S-100 Boards

Video Display Board    8080 CPU   FDC

 

This page was last modified on 02/18/2022