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This is not our actual computer. 8 of them had audio cassette recorders attached to load or save programs. One had a pair of 8” floppy disk drives and a Diablo Daisy Wheel printer attached. That was our “business computer” and we charged slightly more to use it. Maybe $3/hour? @netbear.bsky.social?

$3 sounds about right.

Yoooo a sol user!!!!!!

Yes!

Gosh those were amazing computers, I absolutely love the design!!

1) The good ol’ SOL-20 from Processor Technology. It had the S-100 bus so it could use cards from the Altair. The keyboard had such a wonderful feeling. It was excellent for word processing with Electric Pencil, the first word processor app I ever used.

2) Chris Hook and I typed up our high school English homework at MCC and printed it out on the Diablo daisy wheel printer. We gleefully turned in our homework in class, making sure everyone could see our fully justified left and right margins. “Computer nerds” was heard mumbled by classmates. ❤️

Those disk drives look very similar to the Apple II disk drives. Did Apple just take some standard disk drives and slap their logo on them?

I think all disk drives at the time used mechanisms from the same few companies and added their own enclosures and software.

You're right. Apparently the company which produced those drives was Shugart Associates. Apple used those drives, as did SOL and also the Commodore PET. Nice.

this 👆 also was my first computer!

Really? I don’t know anyone now who had a Sol-20! @anniefox.com and I opened a nonprofit microcomputer center in 1977 with 9 of them. The Marin Computer Center.

According to Wikipedia, there were only 12,000 units made. That’s not a lot of people!

That keyboard is 😙👌

Do you remember what you used for a monitor/screen display?

We bought inexpensive B&W TVs. Pretty sure they were not monitors. There was an RF converter, I think. I can see the channel selection knob in the front. For sound, we’d stick a portable radio next to the computer, and some games used timed loops to create radio interference at specific frequencies.

that's marvelous — thank you I was specifically curious about the RF modulator. (I thought the SOL left it to the user to DIY it.)