Cromemco System Three - the professional one

With a 4MHz Z80A CPU and an expansive <i>21</i> card slots, the System 3 was particulary impressive in being able to address 16MB of memory - a fairly fantastical amount in 1979, where 4-32K was the normal order of the day.

The advert also nicely shows off the prevailing fashion in 70s and 80s adverts: the use of low-cut dresses and boobs to sell computers.

The price of the system was £3,293 - an snip at about [[3293|1979]] in [[now]] terms, with an additional hard-disk sub-system - the HDD-11 - available for £5,025 ([[5025|1979]]). 

Also check out the handy-sized 8" floppy disks in use - these were <a href="ads_031">Persci's</a> Model 277 drives and used IBM 3740 formatting to give 1.9MB per disc.

The system as a whole reviewed quite well - Sue Eisenbach wrote in October 1979's PCW that 

~"there is nothing gimmicky about the hardware or software.  The hardware is solid; the operating system is more extensive than CP/M; the supporting software is reliable, comprehensive and well documented"[source: Cromemco System 3 Bench Test, Personal Computer World, October 1979, p. 38].

Unusually, Cromemco was one of relatively few companies not to use Microsoft's de-facto standard BASIC. 

One advantage of this was that Cromemco's BASIC pre-compiled each line into machine code as it was entered, which saved on storage and made programs much faster to run. 

A couple of months earlier, the first 64K memory card for Cromemco systems had been debuted in the UK by Edinburgh-based distributor MicroCentre. 

The card cost £1,100 including VAT - around [[1100|1979]] in [[now]] money, which actually represented a saving of 43% over the previous 4 x 16K cards[source: "Tid Bits", Personal Computer World, June 1979, p. 13]. 

That's still about £115 million per gigabyte in 2023 prices, although that was a drop from about <a href="byte_1977-01-00_010">£185 million per gigabyte in 1975</a>.

