Equinox: All Together Now!

The Equinox 100 was a Zilog [!Z80] or Intel [!8080]-based system with an industry-standard S-100 bus - the most popular bus standard of the day. 

It was built by Parasitic Engineering of Albany, California, which had started out as a supplier of "debugging kits" for the [#Altair 8800]. These were upgrade kits for the Altair's power supply which helped to reduce noise on its S-100 bus. 

In early 1978 it was estimated that there were more than fifty manufacturers in the US producing all sorts of upgrades and plug-in cards for S-100 systems, from extra memory to laboratory interfaces and speech synthesizers.

The Equinox was launched in the UK at the Mini-Micro exhibition in early 1978, held at the US Government Trade Centre in London. The complete micro - including 32K RAM and dual floppy disks - retailed for just under £3,000, which is about [[3000|1978]] in [[now]].

Previously available in the US as a "mainframe kit" for $799 - about [[540|1977]] in [[now]], the built version of the Equinox used the WünderBuss motherboard, designed by well-known electronics engineer George Morrow[source: Products Page, PCW, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, p. 73]. Morrow also had a hand in the design of the actual Equinox 100 micro itself.

[picture: thinker_byte_jul77.webp|An advert for George Morrow's WünderBuss, from Morrow's Micro-Stuff, and sold via the Thinker Toys brand. From Byte, July 1977]

George Morrow would later set up Morrow Designs, which produced the  [=morrow_praccomp_1982-10|Decision series] of micros in 1982.
