Ancient Web: Compucolor II Got a Browser Emulator After Thirty-Five Years

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

As a teenager, Jim Battle coveted a Compucolor II advertised in computer magazines. Mowing lawns at three dollars a job was not going to buy him a $1,500 computer. Thirty-five years after the machine's 1978 debut, he finally put a version inside a browser.

Visit the Compucolor II tribute.

Built by Intelligent Systems Corporation of Georgia, the Compucolor II combined an Intel 8080 processor, a color television-style display, and a built-in 5¼-inch floppy drive. In a market full of comparatively restrained monochrome machines, its colored keys and colorful text were distinctive.

Battle received an intermittently functioning unit in 2002. He salvaged its ROM and steadily obtained manuals and floppy disks. He says he had planned an emulator for years before releasing his JavaScript version in March 2013.

The disks were worth saving too

The virtual-media catalog is an enormous annotated collection. It ranges from BASIC lessons, financial calculators and development tools to games such as Alien Invasion, Colossal Cave Adventure, and Asteroids. Some entries provide virtual disks and a 'try it' link; other entries admit that a program fails or lacks documentation.

The document collection includes programming and maintenance manuals, Colorcue newsletters, user-group records, and old product reviews. Battle distinguishes material he has permission to publish from books whose authors he was still trying to reach. That's the less glamorous side of preservation: owning a scanner doesn't settle publication rights.

A guestbook contains especially useful evidence of impact. Former users describe learning to program on these machines, while a contributor identified as Steve Bour reports finding source code he wrote in 1979 and had thought lost.

The website itself was launched in 2013, not 1978. It qualifies as a preservation project whose subject, documentation and software are genuinely historical. The emulator's present-day operation was not tested here.

Explore the recovered disks and the preservation diary.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.