Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications. Designed by Nate Wadsworth and Bob Findley in 1973, it was based on the Intel 8008 processor, and was the first microprocessor based kit to hit the market. It came with 1KB of RAM for It’s advertised price of $565. It had 4 kilobytes of internal memory and a cassette tape, with both teletype and oscilloscope interfaces. In 1975, Scelbi introduced the 8B version with 16 kilobytes of memory for the business market. The 8H was the first commercially advertised microprocessor-based computer in the U.S. The company sold around 200 machines, losing $500 per unit.
Category Archives: 1974
Zilog
Zilog was founded in 1974 and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Exxon Corp. by 1980. The company’s management and employees purchased Zilog back from Exxon in 1989. Zilog became a publicly-held company in February, 1991. In March of 1998, Zilog was privatized, as a result of the merger and recapitalization transaction by Texas Pacific Group (TPG). Zilog now produce a range of microcontrollers, microprocessors, and digital signal processors, covering the home entertainment, communications, and embedded systems markets.