Datapoint 2200

[3] Its industrial designer John "Jack" Frassanito has later claimed that Ray and Roche always intended the Datapoint 2200 to be a full-blown personal computer, but that they chose to keep quiet about this so as not to concern investors and others.

The fact that most laptops and cloud computers today store numbers in little-endian format is carried forward from the original Datapoint 2200.

[7][8] The original design called for a single-chip 8-bit microprocessor for the CPU, rather than a processor built from discrete TTL modules as was conventional at the time.

[9] Possibly because of their speed advantages compared to MOS circuits, Datapoint continued to build processors out of TTL chips until the early 1980s.

Already successful and widely used, the x86 architecture's further rise after the success in 1981 of the original IBM Personal Computer with an Intel 8088 CPU means that most desktop, laptop, and server computers in use today[update] have a CPU instruction set directly based on the work of CTC's engineers.

The instruction set of the highly successful Zilog Z80 microprocessor can also be traced back to the Datapoint 2200 as the Z80 was backwards-compatible with the Intel 8080.

Although the Datapoint 2200 version I is somewhat faster than an Intel 8008 on register instructions, any reference to the 2200's shift-register memory incurs a large 520 μs delay.

Also any JMP, CALL, or RETURN can incur a variable delay up to 520 μs depending on the distance to the new address.

[5][10] The following Datapoint 2200 assembly source code is for a subroutine named MEMCPY that copies a block of data bytes from one location to another.

Industrial design (how the box's exterior looked, including the company's logo) was done by Jack Frassanito.