In December 1981, Inc. magazine named Cromemco in the top ten fastest-growing privately held companies in the U.S.[1] In 1987, it was acquired by Dynatech Corporation of Boston.

In 1973 a kit for one of these projects, an “Op Amp Tester”, was sold by a company called MITS which would later launch a revolutionary microcomputer on the cover of Popular Electronics.

[6] In 1974, Roger Melen was visiting the New York editorial offices of Popular Electronics where he saw a prototype of the MITS Altair microcomputer.

Melen was so impressed with this machine that he changed his return flight to California to go through Albuquerque, where he met with Ed Roberts, the president of MITS.

[7] At that meeting, Roberts encouraged Melen to develop add-on products for the Altair, beginning with the Cyclops digital camera that was slated to appear in the February 1975 issue of Popular Electronics.

[8][9] On returning to California, Melen and Garland formed a partnership to produce the Cyclops camera and future microcomputer products.

They named the company “Cromemco” after the Stanford dorm (Crothers Memorial Hall) where they first began their collaboration.

[10] Melen and Garland began work on the Cyclops Camera interface for the Altair, and this spawned several other projects for their young company.

The D+7A could do much more than just interface a joystick, however, and it was this card that allowed the Altair to be connected to the world of data acquisition and industrial computing.

[18] The Z-1 was succeeded by the Z-2 in June 1977, which featured 64K of RAM[19] and the ability to run Cromemco DOS (CDOS), a CP/M-like operating system.

[20] The Z-2 also added a parallel interface in addition to an RS-232C serial port and no longer included the large panel of switches that had been part of the Z-1 model.

The System Three was designed for multiuser professional use and included an optional hard disk, CRT terminal, printer and the main computer unit.

[33] “If they hired you into their R&D Department, they gave you an office and a computer and asked you what you wanted to do” recalls Roger Sippl, an early Cromemco employee.

Joe McCrate, Curt Terwilliger, Tom McCalmont, Jerry May, Herb Lewis, and Marvin Kausch had all been students of the company founders at Stanford University.

[47] [48] Cromemco developed a special version of the CS-200 computer (called the CS-250) to meet the requirements of the Air Force's Mission Support System (MSS).

"[62] In 2011, Mona Simpson revealed, in a eulogy for her brother Steve Jobs, that she had considered buying a Cromemco as her first computer.