I still have one of these. I bought it while I was working at Intel. It was US$100 IIRC with employee discount.
That job involved writing production test code in 8085 assembly in 1982. If you have any Intel 27128A EPROMs - all were tested with my code. That job was technically an internship between my junior and senior year of engineering school (EE) but it was "real serious work" not some make work stuff. This was in "Santa Clara 2" back when the corporate HQ was still in Santa Clara 1 (which connected to SC2). Now Intel HQ is in a new building on Mission College Blvd about 1.5 miles from SC1/SC2.
There was no mass storage with the MCS85 boards. You either had to enter your entire program in hex when you powered up or you wrote an EPROM. The marketing theory was that you'd use one of the Blue Box Intellec systems to generate code and EPROMs.
The "Mass Storage" solution required the Blue Box Intellec, which was only floppy based when I used it to develop production test code.
We had two systems at work: one with one floppy and one with two floppies. The latter was the one we fought over because you had to use one 175K disk for your OS (and as you ran the OS it would swap-in code from the floppy) and you could use the 2nd floppy for your code. When you used the 1-floppy version, you had to constantly swap floppy disks on demand alternating between the OS disk and your code disk. The operating system was CP/M though Intel marketed it as "ISIS". The work flow was:
- Boot ISIS with system disk in floppy
- Load your program in edlin
- (on single floppy system: get prompted to put system disk in)
- (on single floppy system: system thinks a bit)
- (on single floppy system: get prompted to put data disk in)
- (on single floppy system: system writes data to your disk)
- (on single floppy system: get prompted to put system disk in)
- Edit code
- Save your code
- (on single floppy system: get prompted to put system disk in)
- (on single floppy system: system thinks a bit)
- (on single floppy system: get prompted to put data disk in)
- (on single floppy system: system writes data to your disk)
- (on single floppy system: get prompted to put system disk in)
- Exit editor
- Invoke assembler on your code
- Wake 5-10 minutes
- Invoke EPROM writer command on your binary code
- Wake 5-10 minutes
- Take EPROM to tester and insert EPROM into ZIF socket for programming
- Debug test program on wafer in wafer prober
- Find a problem with test program on wafer in wafer prober
- Think about what could be wrong/Study code/Diagnose problem
- Throw EPROM into the EPROM eraser
- Go to step #2 unless program works
- program works and is complete
It seems insane now but compared to what the MSC-85 board required and what my previous non-floppy CP/M system from the 1970s required, it was luxurious. I haven't really used by MCS-85 in part because even the Intellec solution is painful. In "theory" you can edit memory from the hex keypad but you can't insert code - only overwrite a memory location so generally you have to "know" the exact sequence.
One thing with this job was I quickly memorized the hex codes for most of the 8085 instructions. That's because the tester had an instruction pointer that you could single step forward for debugging but the only display was a pair of hex LEDs for address and another for instruction data, so you'd have to know the instructions only from that. I got pretty good at reading 8085 hex. I still remember a few like 0xCD which is CALL.