My own first computer was a second-hand Cromemco with an external floppy drive and a boot disk. It must have been very unknown in Switzerland because I have never seen such a computer since then. This computer had a separate floppy to boot CDOS, the operating system. The only game for this Cromemco I know is Chess. After two years I also gave this computer away because I never liked it really and preferred to own a commodore computer.
CROMEMCO was founded in 1976 by 2 Stanford Students, Roger
Melen and Harry Garland, who lived in the CROthers MEMorial Hall dormitory
on the Stanford campus. Cromemco's products were based on the ZILOG-80
integrated processor chip, a development of the architecture of the Intel-8008.
At is peak (~1983) Cromemco's size had about 500 employees and about $55
Million/year in revenue. By that time it had become the preferred supplier
for micro-computers to the People's Republic of China.
Cromemco was always a private corporation, wholly owned by Roger Melen
and Harry Garland. It was never publicly traded. I don't know how much
they sold it for.
The company that bought Cromemco was Dynatech, in 1985 or 1986. It's
weather systems were dependent on Cromemco Computers. Dynatech was a company
that owned several electronics subsidiaries: Colorgraphics Weather Systems,
Fuzz Buster, etc. After the takeover, the old Cromemco sign at 280 Bernardo
was changed to "Dynatech Computer Systems", but now even that one is gone.
Video output board for the S-100 microcomputer bus. This was the 1st colour graphics display for a microcomputer.
Z-80 processor, 32K byte memory. Used CDOS operating system, based on CPM from Digital Research.
64K memory, S-100 bus, slots for n cards, Z-80 processor, 1 to 4 8" floppy disk drives (Made by Persci), holding 500K bytes. This was the most popular machine in CROMEMCO's history. It was, a.o., designated by the PRC as the official computer for higher education.
Integrated computer. Single board in the display case; no S-100 plug-in capability. One floppy drive built-in, one optional external floppy drive. Had a relatively friendly user interface, designed by Jeff Johnson.
CDOS is based on CP/M from Digital Research and uses DOS like commands.
http://www.cromemco.com