Fairchild F-8 Microprocessor System
A long time ago I purchased a 1975 Fairchild F-8 Microprocessor based system at a Hamfest.
The system consists of a backplane and several cards that combine to make a basic system. The boards are shown below. They consist of a CPU board, a PROM board and a memory board.
At one point I had a paper tape program that went to this system, but it was damaged and lost many years ago.
The processor chips used are the Fairchild 3850 (CPU), 3851(ROM) and 3853.
The board has the name Pronetics Corp with a date of 1975 on it. It looks like it was actually made in 1976 as that is the date of most of the IC’s.
There is a DB9 on the backplane that provides a TTY connection to the system.
I have been able to power the unit up and get a menu system from the TTY port.
The PROM board has only empty sockets, the way it was when I purchased it.
The RAM board contains several banks of 2102’s. It is a 4K RAM board as noted on the back of the board.
The CPU board contains the F3850 CPU, F3851 1K ROM and an F3853 Memory Interface.
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