IMSAI 8080 Introduction

 

A while back I acquired and IMSAI 8080 system that was headed for the trash. Many people may remember this system from the 1983 film Wargames, a personal favorite of mine. Here is a brief look at the components that came with the system, I will write some more in-depth posts on each part in the future. 

The system was in cosmetically good shape when I got it, still needed some cleaning in this picture. It powered up ok, but had some problems with the front panel that I needed to troubleshoot.

Here is a look inside. The boards there were included, front to back...

- CPU board with a Dutronics Dz80 upgrade that replaced the 8080 CPU with a Z80.

- Fully populated Z16, 16K RAM board

- Second Z16 with only 12K of RAM

- Floppy disk controller. I couldn't find any information on this one so had to reverse engineer it.

- Technical Design Labs SMB  System Monitor Board. 

Heathkit H19 dump terminal. This worked perfectly when I got it.

Innovex 10" floppy drive. I haven't tried to get this working yet.

This is a dot matrix printer that prints onto cash register style tape. There weren't any markings on it to identify the manufacturer, but I got a response from Lee Felsenstein on Facebook identify the manufacturer as  Practical Automation.