The microtrol is an 8-bit "Portable" microcomputer. WIth it's heavy case, it was not easy to cary around, but it did have a handle on the top for that purpose. It is an industrial computer that could program EPROMS using the built in EPROM burner. It was equipped with 512KB Main RAM, 16KByte S-RAM and 512KB additional RAM. It has a built in 3.5" Floppy Disk Drive, a parallel and serial port and a full stroke built in keyboard.

The Motorola 6809 is an 8-bit microprocessor with some 16-bit features. It was designed by Motorola's Terry Ritter and Joel Boney and introduced in 1978. Although source compatible with the earlier Motorola 6800, the 6809 offered significant improvements over it and 8-bit contemporaries like the MOS Technology 6502, including a hardware multiplication instruction, 16-bit arithmetic, system and user stack registers allowing re-entrant code, improved interrupts, position-independent code and an orthogonal instruction set architecture with a comprehensive set of addressing modes.