From Wayne Gale (June 2006)

Re: Exidy Sorcer computer.
I have an Exidy Sorcerer that I purchased when they first came on sale and I have a standard S100 bus chassis and an interface that I built myself to allow me to connect to the S100 bus and build extra memory and connect two 8" 1.2MB drives. The drives allowed me to use some more commercial software such at Wordstar etc. The system still works OK although my monitor failed and I have not had time to modify or find another old one to use.

I still have a range of documentation on the system such as circuit diagrams etc. Is there anything that you particularly want in relation to the system?

From Lorenzo Hagerty in response (June 2006)

Ahhh, those were the days, weren't they? . . . The good ole 300 baud modem daZe . . . my seven year old granddaughter won't even use the Net unless she has a high speed connection . . . My grandfather walked five miles to school each day, I had to use a 300 baud modem . . . I wonder what sad tales she will tell her grandkids.

Thanks for bringing up those Exidy memories, Wayne. It's been nice thinking about them again.

Curator: Lorenzo is a longtime friend and in the past created a whole company around the Exidy products. More will be featured here on that.

From John Borders (Feb 2009)

I am the original author of the Exidy Sorcerer Monitor progam and the ROM-PAC release of Basic, Spellbinder and the CPM interface. I started work with Exidy in 1978 when Howell Ivy was president. He needed someone to write the cassette interface drivers and knew I had been working the Byte Shop president, Paul Terrell. I was helping the Byte Shop of Hayward owner to get started.

Anyway, Howell asked me to write the cassette drivers and like the results so much that he offered me the position of Director of Software and we were off to the races. I quickly coded the rest of the Monitor program and polished it up enough to get it into production. I told Howell that I wanted to release source code for the monitor as I thought it would generate additional software in the market and he agreed! You can thank the fact that many "add-on" that came from the Monitor being freely available to me, LOL.

We moved on next to the ROM-PACS and talked to a young upstart (he was my age at the time) named Bill Gates. We inked a deal and got the source code for his Basic interpreter. It didn't take too much to repackage this (most bootup, initialization and cassette interfaces) to get this into a ROM-PAC and onto the market. The most fun I had was writing the CP/M drivers for the new floppy disks that Howell and his team built the hardware interfaces. My software development team had grown to 5 people and we all worked furiously to get CP/M up and running.

What a fun time.