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| class ="wikitable" align="right" width=250 Technical description The Datapoint 2200 had a built-in full-travel keyboard, a built-in 12-line, 80-column green screen monitor, and two tape drives. Its size (a B×W×H of roughly 2×2×1 ft) and shape (a cuboid box with protruding keyboard) approximated that of an IBM Selectric typewriter. Initially a Diablo 2.5Mb 2315-type removable cartridge hard disk drive was available, along with modems, several types of serial interface, parallel interface, printers and a punched card reader. Later, an 8-inch floppy disk drive was also made available, along with other, larger hard disk drives. In late 1977, local area networking through ARCnet became available. The original Type 1 2200 shipped with 2 kilobytes of serial shift register main memory, expandable to 8K. The Type 2 2200 used denser 1 kbit RAM chips, giving it a default 4K of memory, expandable to 16K. Its starting price was around US$5,000, and a full 16K Type 2 2200 had a list price of just over $14,000. The 2200 models were succeeded by the 5500, 1100, 6600, 3800, 8800, etc. The seed of the x86 architecture Aside from being one of the first personal computers, the Datapoint 2200 has another connection to computer history. Its original design called for a single-chip 8-bit microprocessor for the CPU, rather than a conventional processor built from discrete TTL modules. In 1969, CTC contracted two companies, Intel and Texas Instruments, to make the chip. TI was unable to make a reliable part and dropped out. Intel was unable to make CTC's deadline. Intel and CTC renegotiated their contract, ending up with CTC keeping its money and Intel keeping the eventually completed processor. CTC released the Datapoint 2200 using about 100 discrete TTL components (SSI/MSI chips) instead of a microprocessor, while Intel's single-chip design, eventually designated the Intel 8008, was finally released in April 1972. The 8008's seminal importance lies in its becoming the ancestor of Intel's other 8-bit CPUs, which were followed by their instruction set compatible 16-bit CPU's—the first members of the x86-family, as the instruction set was later to be known. Thus, CTC's engineers may be said to have fathered the world's most commonly used and emulated instruction set architecture from the mid-1980s to date. Credits The original instruction set architecture was developed by Victor Poor and Harry Pyle. The TTL design they ended up using was made by Gary Asbell. Industrial design (how the box's exterior looked, including the company's logo) was done by Jack Frassanito. Specifications Main unit Peripherals Users of the 2200 and succeeding terminals eventually had several optional units to choose from. Among these were | |||||||
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