From mid-summer of 1978 to mid-summer of 1979, Digi-Key’s advertisements in electronics catalogs listed a SC/MP based single board computer that ran National Semiconductor’s version of Tiny Basic called NIBL. Digi-Key called this board ‘The Nibbler’ , and eventually were a few companion boards, like memory expansion, power supply / serial interface, analog to digital, and perhaps others.
I was able to get one of these boards as well as the original documentation, and have created a workalike series of boards to include the single board computer CPU, 4K/8K RAM, 4K/8K ROM, and a backplane. All of these build files are available on this site and a copy of the Nibbler user’s manual is available on the bitsavers archive site. The bare boards from the board house should only cost a few dollars each and all the components are reasonably available. The SC/MP 8060 will set you back a bit, but the build is not overly expensive.
The SC/MP processor is a little unusual but if running National’s NIBL, the user is mostly isolated from it’s quirks. However, with this board set and a supercharged version of National Semiconductor’s KitBug resident monitor (also available for download here), this is a great platform for learning about one of the lesser known processors.
