In the fall of '74 I ran across a copy of Radio Electronics and the Mark 8 Minicomputer in my school library. For the next two years, owning my own computer was at the top of my goal list. I worked and saved, and in late '76 I finally had enough to join the computer revolution. Since power, and not nostalgia ruled, I had long since forgotten about 8008 based machines, and I spent my savings on a Digital Group system. The Mark 8 Minicomputer faded from my memory.

I am in the process of getting all the pieces of my Mark 8 microcomputer working again. Several people have asked about what it looks like, what hardware is included etc. I will be, on occasion, posting progress reports here as things get restored.

The Mark 8 was written up in Radio TV Electronics Magazine in 1973 as a home construction project. It was based on the first 8-bit micro, the Intel 8008. (not 8080, 8088, 8086.....) I built mine in 1975 /76 because at the time an 8080 chip was about $150.00 and I built the whole Mark 8 for about that (at least the basic section.) When I finished playing with it, it had 15K RAM, 1K EPROM (2708), a TV character generator (8x32 from the Digital Group), a cassette interface (also from the digital group) Scelbal basic and other miscellaneous software and hardware.

I've recently assembled a Mark-8 computer. This is a microcomputer based on the Intel 8008, the first 8-bit microprocessor. The computer was designed by Jon Titus and published in Radio Electronics magazine in 1974, and was one of the first computers that a hobbyist could hope to own. It inspired many in the early computer revolution of the 1970's.

The Mark-8 was the first personal computer.

Before hard drives and printers; before floppy disks and dumb terminals; before the Motorola 6800 and the Intel 8080; there was the Intel 8008, the first 8-bit microprocessor. And in July 1974, Radio-Electronics magazine printed a construction article about building an 8008-based personal computer.

This is the issue that started it all. Before Apple, or even Altair, there was the Mark-8. I built such a computer, and this is my story.

The year was 1974. I don't remember the exact month anymore, but someone showed me an article in Radio-Electronics magazine about building a computer. That's nice, I remember thinking, but what would I use a computer for? I was in 9th grade and had my goals set on being an electronics technician and a ham radio operator. In fact, I had just been accepted by the county vo-tech to go there in 10th grade to study just that. I went to vo-tech for three years, and during my junior year, something started to change. Yes, I still wanted to be an electronics technician and a ham radio operator, but I was discovering there was more out there than amplifiers and transmitters. When we started studying digital electronics, I knew I had found what I had been looking for, because I saw immediately how digital electronics could be applied to create the building blocks of a computer. I still wasn't sure what I could use a computer for, but I soon started wanting one.

Mark 8 Personal Computer
Sunday, 18th September 2005, 01:40 a quite complex program is running now ;o) Output to ports, incrementing of several registers, conditional jumping...

Still problems left,... program cannot be started properly, failures with interrupt instruction inserting. Starting address must be hit by incident ;o)

It's difficult to know just where to start, but I think the real start for me and microcomputers just may be around 1972. I had been a serious ham radio operator since 1953, always designing & building my own transmitters, amplifiers, antennas, and sometimes my own design receiver for use on the amateur radio bands from 1.8 MHz through 10,000 MHz. I never had any formal training in Electronics. I just taught myself. My education was as a Latin Teacher. But in 1967, I left teaching and joined IBM in Denver as a field engineer and became a specialist on the IBM 360/20 computer in hardware and software. I loved CPU and Telecommunication problems and had the IBM 360/20 machine language down cold.

Nope, but the Mark-8 (1974) was the first microcomputer kit with plans published in a popular magazine. The Mark-8 provided the first big spark that catalyzed the hobbyist movement. Before the Mark-8 appeared, there was at least one hobbyist newsletter, the ACS Newsletter, published by the Amateur Computer Society, which focused primiarily on the PDP-8, the machine which inspired the Mark-8. The Mark-8 spawned a few more hobbyist newsletters, such as Hal Singer's Micro-8 and Hal Chamberlin's The Computer Hobbyist.