It was presented as a series of construction articles in Electronics Australia magazine's August, September and October 1981 issues.

For this, the purchaser received the computer PCB, an assembly manual (a copy of the construction articles from Electronics Australia) and basic components, including 16kB of RAM and a 2kB EPROM containing a machine code monitor program.

The computer proved to be a popular construction project, with an advertisement in November 1982 claiming: "Over 2000 sold.

"[1] The popularity of the Super-80 led to a small industry growing up around addressing the shortcomings of the original computer - especially the black and white, 32 × 16 character, upper case only video display.

The board was supplied in a light cardboard sleeve that appeared to be an LP record sleeve, having the words "Dick Smith Super 80 Microcomputer Kit Printed Circuit Board" and the part number "Cat H-8402" printed along the spine.

Pressing the keys , and <4> at the same time generated an interrupt that would perform a "warm start" of the monitor program.

Accessing the cassette interface required the video display to be switched off, so an LED was provided to show activity during a tape load or save operation.

[4] In its November 1981 edition (p93), Electronics Australia announced a programming competition with the chance to win one of two dot matrix printers.

The magazine later compiled the better programs submitted by readers into a book called Software for the Super-80 Computer.

The El Graphix kit added the ability to display lower case characters and "chunky" graphics.

The board gave the Super-80 similar video display capabilities to the Applied Technology Microbee computer, released about six months after the Super-80.

The UFDC used a primitive track based disk operating system called "Super-80 DOS", however a CP/M BIOS later became available.

The MXB-1 contained space for extra EPROMs, an optional battery backed real time clock, a centronics compatible printer interface and address decoding for up to 192kB of RAM.

The El Graphix "X-RAM" board provided up to 16K of battery backed CMOS RAM or EPROM.