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SUPERBRAIN

The Superbrain was an integrated system with keyboard, display and disc drives. The system used two Z80A microprocessors at 4 MHz, one for the main processing, and the other for peripheral activities.

The dual 5" floppy disc units could be 2x170 KB (single side), 2x340 KB (DS), and a 10 MB CompuStar hard disk could be added.

The SuperBrain was sold with the CP/M operating system, Microsoft Basic, an 8080 assembler and Microsoft Cobol 74.

The SuperBrain II appeared in 1982. It offered a faster and enhanced disk operating system, new video visual attributes and better graphics capabilities.

More information from Michael Hoyle who was an application engineer for Intertec; he is now the President of CornerStone Technologies, Inc.:
All Intertec systems were sold, installed and serviced by dealers around the world.
Intertec manufactured the entire product including designing and producing the circuit boards and molding the cabinets.
Intertec first manufactured dumb and smart terminals. The dumb version was called Intertube. The smart one emulated various common terminals (VTxxx etc) and was called the Emulator. They looked similar to the Superbrain, but smaller.
The SuperBrain and SuperBrain II was 5¼ floppy disk based CP/M machines. Four models in each category:
- 10 (no drives - network only),
- Jr 170K,
- QD 340K,
- SD 780K.
Each could have one or two drives. Intertec did not sell or support a hard drive or an S-100 bus for these machines.
The network version of the SuperBrain was called CompuStar. The network was a parallel cable design with large gray cables about ½" diameter. CompuStar had three "file servers" that accepted up to 255 machines:
- DSS-10 10MB 8" Winchester drive,
- CDC 96MB, 80MB fixed with a 16MB removable platter,
- Priam 144MB 14" platter winchester.
Intertec manufactured the controllers for the last two and an enclosure/PS for the Priam. CDC had to go on-site to install the 96MB.