This Week's Puzzler

This week we delve a little into the history of technology – relatively recent history, which I am ancient enough to have personally participated in!

The ubiquitous personal computer is based on a “microcomputer chip” such as an Intel Pentium. Microcomputers first appeared in the 1970s, initially as the brains behind primitive four-function electronic calculators. Several companies produced early microcomputers powerful enough to be considered a general purpose computer, but arguably the first such microcomputer was the Intel 8008 – a primitive and slow little computer that was nevertheless quite a revolutionary device.

Unlike most earlier digital computer technology, the 8008 was cheap enough to be accessible to the hobbyist community, and a tiny little company produced an 8008 kit within weeks of the chip's initial release. This kit created quite a stir in the hobbyist community, and hundreds of nutcases like myself bought one. The kit was really just a bag of parts and a schematic – to assemble the kit required mainly wire-wrapping, a bit of soldering, and the ability to provide an adequate power supply.

I had my kit assembled and running in two days, and I was thrilled – I actually personally owned a computer! At the time, I was a DS (computer repair technician) in the U.S. Navy, and the computers I worked with there were the size of a large refrigerator – and yet not as powerful as the little 8008 that I kept in a cardboard box. I'm sad to say that I've long since lost that assembled kit. Advances in technology were fast even then, and it was only a year or two until that kit was obsoleted by a succession of more advanced microcomputer systems, based on chips like the 8080, Z80, 6800, and 6502.

What was the name of that wire-wrap 8008 kit? Display your geekiosity, and vote your answer at right...