31/08/2026
Some of you already recognized it from last week, we have a complete CompuColor II!
Last week we received the monitor and for a few days, it seemed like the keyboard was lost in the mail. But after some calls the keyboard was delivered.
The CompuColor II has been on our wish list for nearly 8 years. We never could find one for sale that was willing to send it to us.
A huge thanks goes to Steen from Denmark who contacted us. He decided that a museum would be the best option for this machine and gave us a fair deal and kept helping us when the keyboard seemed missing.
The CompuColor II is the first color home computer system with built-in color graphics and floppy-based data storage. The computer was introduced in 1977 and released in 1978. It's powered by an Intel 8080 CPU running at 2MHz. It came with either 8, 16 or 32 KB of RAM with prices ranging from $1,495 to $2,395. A similar price got an Apple II that was also color (at least, in NTSC-countries). However, the Apple II couldn't do text color, which the CompuColor II did. Also, the CompuColor II was released in the Netherlands and the Apple II wasn't.
Between 1,000 and 2,000 of these computers are produced before the company went bankrupt in 1983.
The time between announcement (1977) and production (1978), caused people to start with either a Commodore PET 2001, Tandy TRS-80 or Apple ][. The price was also pretty high for its time and the floppy drive was quite unstable. Making this a very rare computer today, as not many were sold and less survived nearly 50 years.
We're extremely happy to have this machine and will be very careful starting this one up, using a variac to slowly add more power after doing some basic checks.
Have you worked with a CompuColor II?
It was actually sold in the Netherlands
