Cromemco Bytesaver

The Bytesaver, introduced by Cromemco in 1976, was the first programmable memory board for the MITS Altair and S-100 bus microcomputer systems.

When Paul Allen travelled to the MITS factory in Albuquerque, New Mexico to demonstrate what would become Microsoft BASIC, he brought with him a punched paper tape of the code that he and Bill Gates had developed.

According to Allen, the 7168 byte program took 7 minutes to load from a Teletype Model 33 paper tape reader.

[4] The Bytesaver used solid-state UV erasable EPROMS that provided up to 8K bytes of program or data storage.

Once programmed the information was retained in the EPROMS, but the memory chips could be erased by removing them from the Bytesaver and placing them under an ultraviolet light.