EDUC-8

The EDUC-8, pronounced "educate", was an early microcomputer kit published by Electronics Australia in a series of articles starting in August 1974 and continuing to August 1975. Electronics Australia initially believed that it was the first such kit, but later discovered that Radio-Electronics had just beaten it with their Mark-8 by one month. However, Electronics Australia staff believed that their TTL design was superior to the Mark-8, as it did not require the purchase of an expensive microprocessor chip.[1]

EDUC-8

EDUC-8 Microcomputer on display at the Computer History Museum.
Manufacturer	Electronics Australia
Type	microcomputer
Release date	August 1974 (1974-08)
Memory	256 bytes of RAM

The EDUC-8 was an 8-bit bit-serial design with 256 bytes of RAM. The internal clock speed was 500 kHz, with an instruction speed of approximately 10 kHz, due to the bit-serial implementation. The instruction set was based on the DEC PDP-8. Although the instruction set was based on the PDP-8 it was missing quite a few instructions, along with some important flags. This was essentially an education machine designed to put people on a path to understanding how a computer worked and how to start programming what was at the time, a common computer in the market.

Unlike the MITS Altair 8800, the EDUC-8 included two serial input and two serial output ports at the back of the computer. The EDUC-8 also had front panel lights and switches to program the computer. The later articles included a variety of peripherals, allowing the computer to interface to a keypad, octal display, paper tape loader, paper tape puncher, printer, keyboard, music player, teleprinter, magnetic tape recorder and alphanumeric display. The articles were collected into a book,[2] where additional information was published detailing how to expand the number of I/O ports to 256, adding up to 32KB of additional memory, and using the computer to control various switches.

Like the PDP-8 this machine was equipped with the same register arrangement. Program counter, Memory Address, Memory Buffer, Accumulator and Switch Register which made programming largely the same as the original.