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.
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