The COSMAC ELF was an RCA 1802 microprocessor-based computer based on a series of construction articles in Popular Electronics magazine in 1976 and 1977. Through the back pages of electronics magazines, both Netronics and Quest Electronics offered low-priced kits that were based on this design. The system was a very early personal computer. It was operated without built-in ROMs and programs were entered directly with help of the CPU integrated DM...
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The COSMAC ELF was an RCA 1802 microprocessor-based computer based on a series of construction articles in Popular Electronics magazine in 1976 and 1977. Through the back pages of electronics magazines, both Netronics and Quest Electronics offered low-priced kits that were based on this design. The system was a very early personal computer. It was operated without built-in ROMs and programs were entered directly with help of the CPU integrated DMA.
It featured two seven-segment display digits for output and a set of toggle switches or a hexadecimal keypad for input. The base configuration had 256 bytes of RAM, but expansion boards could raise that to 4096 or 32,768 bytes of RAM.
The original ELF computers were essentially home-built versions of the RCA Microtutor I and Microtutor II, which were RCA's self-contained demonstration boards for their CDP1801 and CDP1802 microprocessors. Later expanded versions of the ELF added features such as keypads for data entry, serial I/O, and the...
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