See also:  PolyMorphic emulator program

In the early days of personal computing (1975 or so) I was in college at the University of Virginia, studying electrical engineering.  You almost had to have a BSEE to figure out a computer, even a small one.  Small computers cost about $400 for the circuit board alone, not counting the soldering iron, your time, and the fact that you couldn't do anything with it except watch the blinky-lights.

Those were the days of the IMSAI, Altair, Sol, and other mostly-homebrew computers, usually reading their programs slowly from a cassette tape.  I looked at all of these, and chose one very few people had ever heard of:  the Poly-88, by PolyMorphic Systems of Santa Barbara, California.

Later, PolyMorphic added floppy disk drives to their 8080-based computer, and the BASIC language, and respectable business applications started to appear.  Poly programmers could choose from BASIC, FORTRAN, Forth, or assembly language.  With our 2 MHz 8080 processors, and our three 5 ¼" single-sided single-density floppy drives (holding a massive 90K bytes each), we thought we were hot stuff!

But it was the early 1980s and the IBM PC was about to change everything.  If you weren't IBM-compatible, you weren't going to be selling PCs anymore.  PolyMorphic Systems tried to keep up with the times, even adding an 18 megabyte hard drive option (left) in 1983.  They also talked about making their software more compatible with industry standards, first with the CP/M operating system, then with IBM-PCs, but it never happened.  PolyMorphic Systems finally closed in 1988.

I built and operated several Polys: 

A Poly-88 "orange toaster" (nicknamed because the boards generated a lot of heat inside the small orange chassis).  This box could only hold five S100 boards and no disk drives.  But that was OK since without a fan, it was intolerably hot with only a CPU, video, and memory card installed.  I taught myself to write a few assembly-language programs with this system, keying them in a byte at a time through Poly's "software front panel" monitor.  But this box was really meant to load programs from cassette tape, and I held out for a disk drive.  So...

Next came a homebuilt 8813, using Poly S100 boards inside a NorthStar chassis, which I found cheaper than the comparable Poly box.  Both were nice wood-grain cabinets.  Mine said NorthStar on the outside, but inside it was pure Poly, hardware and software (except for a Godbout EconoRAM memory card).

Finally I acquired a "stock" 8810, which would normally hold one disk drive, and modified it to hold two half-height drives.  I also added custom-interfaced hard drives to most of these machines.  My first hard drive had 8" platters, stored 5 (five!) megabytes, and weighed about 40 pounds.  It's probably anchoring a boat somewhere now.

That 8810 (right) was my last working Poly, and I finally made the choice to decommission it during our last move. 

(A moment of silence, please...)

Mark Sutherland and I worked together on a user-group newsletter called PolyLetter.  It was published by Mark, then me, then several other Poly enthusiasts: Frank Stearns, Charles Steinhauser, and Ralph Kenyon, for a total of about 15 years.  We Poly folks were a die-hard group.

Around 1990 I wrote a Poly Emulator program which can run most Poly programs on an IBM-PC.  I'm still tinkering with it from time to time. 

Why were we so addicted to our Polys?  Other early PCs such as the Radio Shack TRS-80 were notorious for being unfriendly.  A TRS-80 might say "Error 123" whereas the Poly would say "No disk in drive, or door open!"  That by itself would have convinced me.  But as an aspiring assembly language programmer, I also loved the "software front panel" that allowed me to key in short programs and modify memory, just like the lights and switches in old minicomputers.  (OK, I'm a geek.)

I still have the following Poly documentation, and can make copies available to anyone interested:

PolyLetter, a user-group newsletter
published 6 times/year, approx. 10 pages/issue. I have all issues from 1980-1993.

Poly-88 Manuals (cassette-based system, manuals dated 1976-78)
Microcomputer System Manual 60pg
Printer interface 21pg
Cassette interface 45pg
Operation and Software 100pg
Memory / interrupts / serial I/O - about 50pg

PolyMorphic System 8810/8813 Manuals (disk-based system)
System-88 Users Manual 126pg + appendices
BASIC manual 1977 - 114pg
System Programmer's Guide 1978 - 112pg
Printer Interface
Video Interface
Text Formatter v5.2, 1980 12pg
8810, 8813, 88/DS Confidence Manual 1978, 38pg + schematics
Confidence version 5, 1979 37pg + schematics
System 88 Confidence Manual 1979, 32pg + schematics
16K RAM board
48K RAM board
TwinSystem notes, 8pg + many schematics
Keyboard III 12pg
Macro-88 Assembler User's Manual 60pg
88/MS Users Manual 23pg + schematics
BASIC C00 Guide 46pg
WordMaster 2.0 125pg
System Programmer's Guide 1981 276pg + listings

If you have any interest in the Poly, please drop me a line: bob@bybeeweb.com

Long before my Poly days, I was interested in the "high tech" gadgets with blinking lights, such as one might see on TV shows like Lost In Space or the Time Tunnel.  So around 8th grade (1968 or so) my friend Paul Jacobsen and I built a mock-up of a computer, with revolving tape reels and blinking Christmas lights, in my attic.  Paul is shown here at the "controls" of our creation.


Around that same time I built other projects, some of which actually worked!  There were two science-fair entries from Popular Electronics: a sound-effects generator called the Blipper (Paul helped with that also), and a binary adding machine using neon bulbs.

And from 1970-73 I spent many hours with a teletype, writing BASIC programs on a timesharing computer.  We used a 110 baud dial-up modem and stored our programs on paper tape.


But my technical interests go back even farther.  My grandparents owned the small telephone company in Alton Maine.  In the early days of telephones, a small-town switchboard would be in somebody's home - in their kitchen, to be precise.  Here I am at age two (in 1957) fascinated by my grandmother working the switchboard.  Electronics has been in my blood ever since then!