It’s alive! Another IMSAI 8080 replica joins the herd

[Roy Tait]

Please forgive me for being ignorant of the IMSAI 8080 kit until I saw the unboxing on Adrian’s Digital Basement II YouTube channel. Before the end of the second minute I was reaching for my credit card.

Two days after the kit arrived, and a painless build, it was up and running what I expect is the IMSAI 8080 equivalent of “Hello World”.

Actually, describing this as a kit is a disservice. By any metric you would care to use, this is a work of art.

David’s meticulous attention to detail shows at every stage. From the presentation of the packaging to the quality of the software. It is present in the little touches that are easily missed or underappreciated; the confident-building methodical approach to testing (and including a test lead), the alignment jigs, even the ‘ignore the big, red NVS error for now’ message that appears when first booting the ESP32 microcontroller. Exceptional!

My one piece of advice is to follow the written instructions and videos precisely. There is a lot of embedded knowledge and experience in them. Indeed, the only issue I encountered during construction was down to me thinking I knew better and skipping ahead. I deservedly got bitten.

If you are thinking of buying one of these kits, don’t hesitate, just do it.

Cheers
  Roy

[Thomas Runge]

Hi Roy,

I couldn't agree more. This is really a beautifully made up kit. I was almost a bit sad having had pulled it out of its package, but the sadness was diminishing once the IMSAI was up and running in all its beauty. Mine came to live on Monday, and I love experimenting with it.

Still need to learn a lot, because when these devices were around, I was still a boy... I came in touch with CP/M only during a very brief period in time in school where we learned some programming in Turbo-Pascal on an Apple ][e.

Wish you as much fun with the IMSAI as I have!

Thomas

[lordha...@gmail.com]

yep the IMSAI kit really is a pleasure. The good news is... you can now get started on a PiDP-8, PiDP-11 and also the AltairDuino!

[R H]

I put my IMSAI together a couple of months ago and it is a really wonderful kit which I will treasure along with its friends (brought together for a class photo) ...

Here it is showing its muscles supporting a PiDP-8, PiDP-11 and an Altair-Duino (a prototype based on a front-panel I found on Fritzing.org; I’ve since updated the PCB to incorporate Dave Hansel's SD card and IOBus extensions and that is currently being soldered/tested).  One that is missing from the picture is a GIGATRON which was also a great kit and an amazing concept.

I now have to move on to build the various SBCs I found over the last two years .. RC-Z8BASIC, 68k-MBC, Z80-MBC2, V20-MBC, SBC2, 6502 SBC (Apple I), 6809 SBC and a ZRCC CPM SBC … hopefully they will prove operational as well.

Cheers, Richard

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[Brent Parker]

My old 1976 Imsai looks nice and happy beside my new Imsai esp too. The color matching, finish, feel of switches are very similar. The exp is the version that started shipping about spring of 2020, with the aluminum blue case (the original was plastic) producing a very good match.(btw - the LED are very much the same red, but cameras do funny things to colors/light. You can see on the esp, where the FF port lights look more orange, but that is only in the photo. They are red.    Brent W8XG

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