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PolyMorphic Systems was a manufacturer of microcomputer boards and systems based on the
S-100 bus The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE 696-1983 ''(withdrawn)'', is an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800. The bus was the first industry standard expansion bus for the microcomputer industry. computers, consisting of ...
. Their products included the Poly-88 and the System 8813. The company was incorporated in California in 1976 as Interactive Products Corporation
d/b/a A trade name, trading name, or business name, is a pseudonym used by companies that do not operate under their registered company name. The term for this type of alternative name is a "fictitious" business name. Registering the fictitious name w ...
PolyMorphic Systems. It was initially based in
Goleta Goleta or La Goleta may refer to: * ''Goleta'' (spider), a spider genus * Goleta, California, United States, a suburban city in Santa Barbara County * La Goleta, the Spanish and Portuguese name for La Goulette La Goulette (, it, La Goletta), i ...
, then
Santa Barbara, California Santa Barbara ( es, Santa Bárbara, meaning "Saint Barbara") is a coastal city in Santa Barbara County, California, of which it is also the county seat. Situated on a south-facing section of coastline, the longest such section on the West Coas ...
.


S-100 boards

PolyMorphic Systems' first products were several interface boards based on the then-popular
S-100 bus The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE 696-1983 ''(withdrawn)'', is an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800. The bus was the first industry standard expansion bus for the microcomputer industry. computers, consisting of ...
. These were compatible with other microcomputers such as the
Altair 8800 The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS and based on the Intel 8080 CPU. Interest grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics and was sold by mail order through advertiseme ...
and
IMSAI 8080 The IMSAI 8080 was an early microcomputer released in late 1975, based on the Intel 8080 and later 8085 and S-100 bus. It was a clone of its main competitor, the earlier MITS Altair 8800. The IMSAI is largely regarded as the first "clone" micr ...
. The first was an A/D and D/A converter board. This was followed by a video terminal interface (VTI) card which became the primary display device for their systems. Later board-level products included CPU,
RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...
, and
disk controller {{unreferenced, date=May 2010 The disk controller is the controller circuit which enables the CPU to communicate with a hard disk, floppy disk or other kind of disk drive. It also provides an interface between the disk drive and the bus connect ...
cards.


Poly-88

With the release of their CPU card, PolyMorphic began selling complete systems. Their first was the Poly-88, housed in a 5-slot S100 chassis, with additional side-mounted S-100 connectors for the purpose of joining chassis together. This unit earned the nickname "orange toaster" due to its orange metal cover, and the fact that the S-100 cards generated noticeable heat."PolyMorphic Systems History"
-- S100 Computers
The Poly-88 was available in kit form, or assembled. It was originally called the Micro-Altair, but after objections from MITS, manufacturers of the Altair, the name was changed.


Hardware

The Poly-88 board set consisted of the following: * Central Processing Unit (CPU) with an
Intel 8080 The Intel 8080 (''"eighty-eighty"'') is the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. It first appeared in April 1974 and is an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibil ...
chip, and an
8251 The 8251 is a Universal Synchronous/Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (USART) packaged in a 28-pin DIP made by Intel. It is typically used for serial communication and was rated for per second signalling rate. It is commonly confused with the mu ...
USART A universal synchronous and asynchronous receiver-transmitter (USART, programmable communications interface or PCI) is a type of a serial interface device that can be programmed to communicate asynchronously or synchronously. See universal asynchron ...
for serial communication to a modem, printer, or cassette tape interface. The cassette tape interface supported program storage and loading from consumer-grade cassette tape recorders, using either
Kansas City standard The Kansas City standard (KCS), or ''Byte'' standard, is a data storage protocol for standard cassette tapes at . It originated in a symposium sponsored by Byte (magazine), ''Byte'' magazine in November 1975 in Kansas City, Missouri to develop a ...
or higher speed
Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...
encoded signals. The board contained 512 bytes of RAM and one 1024-byte
ROM Rom, or ROM may refer to: Biomechanics and medicine * Risk of mortality, a medical classification to estimate the likelihood of death for a patient * Rupture of membranes, a term used during pregnancy to describe a rupture of the amniotic sac * R ...
. * Video Terminal Interface (VTI) which produced a 16-line display of 64 characters per line. The VTI was intended to drive a television using an
RF modulator An RF modulator (or radio frequency modulator) is an electronic device whose input is a baseband signal which is used to modulate a radio frequency source. RF modulators are used to convert signals from devices such as media players, VCRs and ...
, or to be connected directly to a TV monitor's
composite video Composite video is an analog video signal format that carries standard-definition video (typically at 525 lines or 625 lines) as a single channel. Video information is encoded on one channel, unlike the higher-quality S-Video (two channels) a ...
input (not commonly available in the 1970s). The VTI also displayed low-resolution graphics (today called
text semigraphics Text-based semigraphics or pseudographics is a primitive method used in early text mode video hardware to emulate raster graphics without having to implement the logic for such a display mode. There are two different ways to accomplish the em ...
). Each character position was divided into a grid 2 dots wide and 3 high, giving a graphics resolution of 128 horizontal and 48 vertical pixels, the same as the original
TRS-80 The TRS-80 Micro Computer System (TRS-80, later renamed the Model I to distinguish it from successors) is a desktop microcomputer launched in 1977 and sold by Tandy Corporation through their Radio Shack stores. The name is an abbreviation of '' ...
. A
TTL TTL may refer to: Photography * Through-the-lens metering, a camera feature * Zenit TTL, an SLR film camera named for its TTL metering capability Technology * Time to live, a computer data lifespan-limiting mechanism * Transistor–transistor lo ...
-level,
parallel Parallel is a geometric term of location which may refer to: Computing * Parallel algorithm * Parallel computing * Parallel metaheuristic * Parallel (software), a UNIX utility for running programs in parallel * Parallel Sysplex, a cluster of IBM ...
keyboard interface was also included on the VTI. Several keyboards were available, including the Keyboard III which included a numeric keypad. * Random Access Memory (RAM) cards were also available, with capacities ranging from 8,192 (8K) bytes up to 56K (the maximum supported in their system architecture). Since the systems were based on the S-100 bus, other manufacturers' memory card could be used in Poly systems as well.


Software

The Poly-88 ROM contained a
boot loader A bootloader, also spelled as boot loader or called boot manager and bootstrap loader, is a computer program that is responsible for booting a computer. When a computer is turned off, its softwareincluding operating systems, application code, a ...
program, capable of reading programs from the cassette tape interface. Available programs included games, utilities, a
BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...
interpreter, and an 8080 assembler.


System 8813

PolyMorphic's disk-based system was the System 8813. It consisted of a larger chassis holding one, two, or three 5-inch minifloppy disk drives from
Shugart Associates Shugart Associates (later Shugart Corporation) was a computer peripheral manufacturer that dominated the floppy disk drive market in the late 1970s and is famous for introducing the -inch "Minifloppy" floppy disk drive. In 1979 it was one of the f ...
. The drives used single-sided, single-density storage on hard-sectored diskettes. Storage capacity was approximately 90K bytes per diskette.


Hardware

System 8813 hardware included the standard CPU and VTI cards; a RAM card, typically with at least 32K of memory; and a disk controller card, to interface with the minifloppy drives. Later, a
Z80 The Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor introduced by Zilog as the startup company's first product. The Z80 was conceived by Federico Faggin in late 1974 and developed by him and his 11 employees starting in early 1975. The first working samples were ...
based disk controller supported double sided, double-density minifloppy drives, and full-size (8-inch) floppy drives.


Software

The Poly disk operating system was called Exec. The three disk drives were distinguished by numbers enclosed in angle brackets such as <1>, rather than the drive letter convention (A:) used by CP/M and later
MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...
. File names were
case-sensitive In computers, case sensitivity defines whether uppercase and lowercase letters are treated as distinct (case-sensitive) or equivalent (case-insensitive). For instance, when users interested in learning about dogs search an e-book, "dog" and "Dog" a ...
and could contain up to 31 characters including a two-character extension. For example, a text file might be named Notes.TX. Various file extensions had predefined meanings: .GO for executable files, .BS for BASIC programs, .OV for overlays. Overlays were used extensively to provide more code space for the operating system. If a file named INITIAL.TX was present when the system booted, commands listed in that file were executed automatically, similar to the
AUTOEXEC.BAT AUTOEXEC.BAT is a system file that was originally on DOS-type operating systems. It is a plain-text batch file in the root directory of the boot device. The name of the file is an abbreviation of "automatic execution", which describes its funct ...
file of an MS-DOS system. Later versions of Exec supported subdirectories. The naming syntax continued to use angle brackets. For example, a file in a second-level subdirectory on drive 2 might be named <2Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...
, no explicit "make directory" command was needed. When a program tried to create a file within a subdirectory, that subdirectory would be automatically created (if it didn't already exist). System 8813 software included an 8080 macro
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and a BASIC interpreter for program development. Poly BASIC used BCD arithmetic for high precision in financial applications. A word-processing system, named WordMaster, consisted of a text editor and separate formatter program.
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wrote his second novel, ''
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'', using WordMaster on a PolyMorphic 8813 system.


Other Products


System 8810

With the introduction of double-sided, double density minifloppy drives, the storage capacity of a single floppy became approximately 360K bytes (the same as the original
IBM-PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team ...
floppy drive capacity). This made it feasible to store Exec, applications and data on a single floppy. The System 8810 was functionally identical to the 8813, but in a smaller chassis, with 5 slots and only one minifloppy drive.


Mass Storage

The 88/MS (Mass Storage) was a cabinet housing dual, 8-inch (full size) floppy drives. It was available with either single- or double-sided disk drives, both using double-density recording on hard-sectored media. The 88/MS could be added onto either an 8813 or 8810 system. The largest Poly configurations would contain three mini-floppy drives and four full-size drives, with drive numbers from 1 to 7. The 88/HD was a subsystem with an 18 MB SASI hard drive, housed in an 8810 chassis. Software called Volume Manager partitioned the available space into several logical disk drives, similar to the
FDISK In computing, the fdisk command-line utility provides disk-partitioning functions, preparatory to defining file systems. fdisk features in the DOS, DR FlexOS, IBM OS/2, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, and in certain ports of FreeBS ...
partitioning command used by other operating systems.


TwinSystem

The TwinSystem was marketed as "Get more work done on a computer built for two." The System 8813 TwinSystem had an additional RAM card, video card, and keyboard.
Bank switching Bank switching is a technique used in computer design to increase the amount of usable memory beyond the amount directly addressable by the processor instructions. It can be used to configure a system differently at different times; for example ...
between the RAM cards allowed the CPU to keep two applications in memory simultaneously. However, the TTL-level keyboard interface limited the distance between the two user stations to a few feet.


CP/M Compatibility

The dominant operating system for microcomputers in this era was
CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...
. Unmodified Poly systems were unable to run CP/M, for several reasons: *Hard-sectored floppy disks. Nearly all CP/M systems used soft-sectored diskettes, so it was difficult to transport information between CP/M and Poly systems. *Memory map. CP/M required RAM from addresses 0000 to (ideally) FFFF hex. The Poly CPU and VTI cards mapped ROM and video memory into the area between 0000 and 1FFF. Late in the system's lifetime, hardware modifications were introduced to solve the memory map issues, and a version of CP/M was released for the 8813.


References

{{reflist


External links


History of Polymorphic Systems computers
(archived 12 Sep 2017). Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer companies based in California Companies based in Santa Barbara, California Computer companies established in 1976 Electronics companies established in 1976 1976 establishments in California