Crosley / Serial #197

Provenance:  This Kenbak-1's history is probably the best documented of any.  And it is responsible for a flurry of renewed interest in the Kenbak-1 around 2004.  It was originally purchased right off the Scientific American advertisement in late 1971 or 1972, by Tom Crosley, a college student.  Tom graduated Iowa State University in electrical engineering, then went back for a master's degree in computer science in 1970.  He wanted a computer of his own to help him practice machine code programming.   He told me "It was a major purchase -- $750 in 1971 is something like $5500 today.  I was only making about $11,000 a year."  He liked the machine, and used it throughout his college years even though he had access to a lot of other computers.  He told me "The Kenbak actually had a more useful instruction set than the PDP-8."  In 1975 he bought a Sphere-1 computer, and commented "It had a 6800 processor, which I was attracted to because the register set almost exactly matched the one in the Kenbak -- two accumulators A and B, and an index register X.  It came out about the same time as the Altair 8800, but I never liked the Intel 8080 instruction set."

Erik Klein was an exceptional custodian of this computer.  It was one of only a couple computers publicly known at the time.  Erik published high resolution photos of this computer to his website, including very detailed photos of the circuitry.  This was even before schematics of the Kenbak-1 were publicly available on the internet.   The online documentation of this computer inspired many people to learn about the Kenbak-1, and even try to build their own reproduction. 

Erik kept this computer until 2024 when he sold it to "The Computer Museum @ System Source" in Baltimore Maryland.

Most of the below were shared by Erik on his website., but a few are unique, taken by request of the back of his computer.