My first computer was a Poly 88; it was already discountinuted by the time I got my hands on it, it’s main failing being the location of the system ROM which prevented it from running CP/M.
It was a gift that came in kit form that took me close to a month to assemble. The original system had an 8080 cpu running at just under 2Mhz, it had an 8K ROM and about 2K of RAM. No disk drive but it did have an interface (which I had to build) to a cassette tape recorder for program/data storage. I bought a 64K S-100 RAM card for it, which cost at the time CDN$400 … however due to a bug in the assembler I had to turn off the top 16K bank otherwise the assembler would assume the system had no memory at all.
Due to power (and frequency) differences between Oz and Canada I left the Poly with a friend when I moved to Oz. She in turn donated it to her old high school … I expect they just cannibalised it.
My second computer was Vic-20 which I had intended to use as a keyboard for the Poly. Then I got an Apple II clone, again in kit form. When I got to Oz I moved up to an Amiga 500, then to a Amiga 2000 (with 68030, SCSI hard drive and tape drive).
Now I have dull boring PCs but at least one of them runs Linux … Oh, and I don’t build them anymore.
