Cromemco Dazzler

[3] The Dazzler came about in a roundabout fashion after Les Solomon, Technical Editor for Popular Electronics magazine, demonstrated the original Altair 8800 to Roger Melen of Stanford University.

The two built a number of add-ons for the machine, collaborating with Terry Walker on the design of the first digital camera called the Cyclops and then moving on to the Dazzler.

[5] In order to "kick start" construction, they offered kits including a circuit board and the required parts, which the user would then assemble on their own.

Sales were so fruitful that Melen and Garland formed Cromemco to sell the Dazzler and their other Altair add-ons, selecting a name based on Crothers Memorial Hall, their residence while attending Stanford.

In a short time the Dazzler had caused a traffic jam on 5th Avenue!” The police had to contact the building landlord and make him disconnect the television.

[9] Over time, Cromemco introduced additional software for the Dazzler, at first on paper tape and later floppy disk, including Spacewar!

The Dazzler lacked its own frame buffer, accessing the host machine's main memory using a custom DMA controller that provided 1 Mbit/s throughput.

[16] The card read data from the computer at speeds that demanded the use of SRAM memory, as opposed to lower cost DRAMs.

0E contained an 8-bit address pointing to the base of the frame buffer in main memory, while 0F was a bit-mapped control register with various setup information.

[19] The Super Dazzler Interface (SDI) had 756 x 484 pixel resolution with the ability to display up to 4096 colors (12-bit RGB), a capability that had previously only been available in much more expensive systems.