Newbear 77-68

The 77-68 was designed by Tim Moore[1] and was offered for sale by Bear Microcomputer Systems of Newbury, Berkshire, England from June 1977.

The basic 77-68 comprised an 8-inch square printed circuit board accommodating the microprocessor, Static RAM of 256 8 bit words and the bare essentials in terms of input/output and timing logic to make a working computer.

Even early mainframe computers required their operators to "toggle" or "dial" in a bootstrap program by hand to get things going on power-up.

There was ample space to create programs that played music, sent and received morse code, operated data storage to media such as a cassette player and even offered game experiences (though these required significant imagination by the user).

For many home computer pioneers, primitive machines like the 77-68 offered a thrill that is hard to describe to a generation that has grown up with technology many times more powerful all around.

A Newbear 77-68 under construction. The orange TV set is the VDU , the metal rack to the right contains the computer circuit boards and the keyboard is just visible, partially obscured by the rack front panel lying on the top. The 1950s blue oscilloscope to the left was an essential de-bugging tool
A bare-bones Newbear 77-68 The blue and white block of DIP switches to the bottom left addressed a word of memory; the LEDs in the bottom centre displayed the contents of that word and the switches to the bottom right could be set to enter a program or data, one word at a time.
A Newbear 77-68 front panel