The ASCI SystemX, also called U68 was a single board training system that was used in an educational environment during the early 1980s.
It was mounted in a wooden box and covered with a smoke colored plastic lid. When it was closed, all the electronic part was covered, except the 16 key hexadecimal keypad and a seven digit LED display.
The main board featured a Motorola 6800 processor and an Exorciser bus connector. Several I/O boards could be connected to the system allowing microprocessor based experiments.
Motorola 6800 is a 8-bit microprocessor which was released at about the same time as Intel 8080. The 6800 had 16-bit address bus and could address up to 64 KB of memory. From common registers the CPU had only two accumulators and one index register. The 6800 didn't have I/O instructions and therefore 6800-based systems had to use memory-mapped I/O for input/output capabilities. Motorola 6800 started the big family of 680x microcontrolers and microprocessors, some of which are still produced today.
Please consider donating your old computer / videogame system to Old-Computers.com or one of our partners from anywhere in the world (Europe, America, Asia, etc.).
Was lucky enough to find four of these that were being thrown out by a school.
Wednesday 4th December 2013
Michael (USA)
The ASCI System X also had an RS-232 port and an available expansion board with BASIC on ROM. IIRC BASIC was launched from the monitor by:
G F836 D
The BASIC board could eat itself if a user POKEd at the wrong addresses.
ASCI''s marketing catchphrase for the System X was "a system so updated, it can''t be outdated". I''m not gonna hold my breath waiting for a USB 3.0 interface though. :)
Saturday 31st December 2011
TC (US)
NAME
SystemX
MANUFACTURER
ASCI
TYPE
Home Computer
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
1979
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
Monitor
KEYBOARD
Hexadecimal 16 keys keypad + NMI and RESET pushbuttons
CPU
Motorola 6800
SPEED
1 MHz, 1.5 MHz with a Fairchild version of the 6800 CPU
