jle (12/10/82)
Several weeks ago, I asked for opinions about Cromemco hardware
and software in general, and the Z80/68000 DPU board in particular.
The response from the net was UNDERwhelming, to say the least. This
seems to be due, in part, to the fact that once again marketing has
gotten ahead of engineering, and, despite the media blitz, hardware
and software deliveries for the 68K system are way behind. However,
true to my word, here is a summary of the answers (additional dialog
would be welcomed):
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We have an old Cromemco System 3 (S3) here at the office; it was
bought new, along with a Terak and several other micros as part of an
attempt to compare microcomputers and see if we could get any real use
out of them in an environment with large timesharing systems
accessable over the ARPANET and large mainframes in-house. (The answer
turned out to be "no", but that's another story...)
Anyway, we were all much impressed with the physical construction
of this Cromemco. The other machines were all in ordinary cabinets
(some in wood); the Cromemco had a slide-out card cage, rack-mount
heavy metal cabinet with a hinged front panel, 8-in disks instead of
5-in, etc.
Don't let appearances fool you.
We lugged that damn Cromemco back and forth from the shop
innumerable times. It's been long ago and I don't recall the details,
but the disk drives were continually getting out of order, the disk
eject switches wouldn't work, and the cards in the fancy card cage
seemed to continually lose contact. For a while we kept it about one
foot above floor level, because when we needed to "boot" it, we really
had to BOOT it, with a solid kick, to get it to initialize. The
serviceman at the local computer shop where we had our S3 worked on
said that he had seen all the other local Cromemco S3's that he know
of in for repair over and over.
I avoided working on it, so I can't evaluate any of the software,
but I do recall that this machine was an early version, with a Beehive
terminal as the console. When we bought another screen editor package,
the dealer and manufacturer knew what we had, but stuck us with a
version of the software that would only work on a later configuration
which had a different terminal as the console. Great customer
relations...
Maybe all this is in the past, and what they make now is great,
but that is my experience with one Cromemco product.
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Cromemco hardware is well made but often "over engineered". By
that I mean they often use older chips and a lot of wires instead of a
newer and less expensive chip. This observation is based on scanty
evidence so I guess I should be a little less general. In general I
would trust their product. The main problem with the Z80/68000
combination is delivery. These systems (from any manufacture) seem to
be advertised but unavailable.
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Cromemco stuff is solid as long as you stay with Cromemco all the
way. There are several incompatabilities when a mixed system is
attempted. The Z80/68000 DPU so far appears to be a very useable
board - I've had no problems buy haven't used the 68K much yet. It is
difficult to reconfigure for systems booting at other than C000H.
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