Contact Information

You are seeing an archived copy of the original website, polymorphic-computers.com. That site is no longer active. Mike Douglas at DeRamp.com has kindly provided this space to publish a mirror of the site. Please visit his site for information on many other vintage computers.

To contact Bob Bybee, the original author of this site (and a big Poly fan) please use the email address below.

About the site

So, why this comprehensive site about the Poly systems?

PolyMorphic wasn't exactly well-known during its prime. Looking at the Web today, there are bits and pieces: a few pictures here, a story there, an occasional system on eBay. But nothing to put it all in perspective. This was a really cool computer system which wasn't marketed well enough to catch on.

I still had a few of those bits and pieces in my collection, and I still had the Poly Emulator. I thought it would be good to collect everything into a Poly "museum" of sorts, to share.

About the webmaster

I studied computers and electronics at the University of Virginia, around the time when small computers were becoming available. I chose the Poly-88 as my first computer. I used it to learn more about assembly language programming. I connected it to the news teletype at WLTA-FM, where I was the chief engineer. My '88 sat in the studio, displaying headlines and weather so the DJs wouldn't have to walk to the back room to check the news wire.

Later, I modified my Poly-88 by adding disk drives and a larger chassis, turning it into an 8813. Eventually I built a hard drive subsystem for it, using a five megabyte, eight-inch hard drive weighing about 30 pounds. Can you say "boat anchor?"

In 1979 I met Mark Sutherland at a Poly User Group meeting at CompuShop, a computer store in the Prado shopping center near Atlanta. Mark was using his 8813s to run a T-shirt printing business. He started a user-group newsletter called PolyLetter. It was published by Mark, then me, then several other Poly enthusiasts: Frank Stearns, Charles Steinhauser, and Ralph Kenyon. Ralph has now donated his PolyLetter archives so we can present them here.

Best wishes,

Bob Bybee
webmaster (shown below in his native habitat during high school)