Projects

IMSAI 8080 - January 17, 2026

This is one of the most well known home computers of the '70s. This IMSAI 8080 system came with dual 8" Pertec floppy drives (in an ICOM disk unit), tons of spare S-100 boards, a Video Terminal Interface (keyboard and television with a corresponding S-100 board), and many 8" floppy disks to archive. Among the floppy disks was a diskette for an operating system that few versions still survive of, ICOM FDOS. This particular diskette is more complete than most already archived and was configured specifically for these drives and video terminal, so it was important to make copies of it before booting the system. Thankfully making additional copies wasn't very difficult with the other 8" diskette hardware here, and I was able to repair the IMSAI and get it to boot FDOS within a couple weeks of acquiring the machine. The system is overall in amazing condition, and was well maintained by its original owner, whom I purchased the machine from. Next for this system is making an easy way to archive the remaining 50+ diskettes, and experiment with running other operating systems (such as CP/M), as many people would have done on S-100 era hardware. Updated 03/04/2026