Cromemco
A Silicon Valley S-100 maker whose Dazzler gave the microcomputer its first colour graphics.
Founded in 1974 by Stanford graduate students Harry Garland and Roger Melen, and named after their dorm, Crothers Memorial. The Cromemco Dazzler (1976) was the first colour graphics card for microcomputers, and the Z-1 and Z-2 systems were built on the Zilog Z80 and the S-100 bus. Its in-house operating system, Cromix, was Unix-like long before that was common on small machines.
Rugged hardware made Cromemco a favourite in television studios and defence work, and the company outlasted most of its S-100 rivals before Dynatech bought it in 1987.