digital group computers

From: Mark Tapley <mtapley_at_swri.edu>
Date: Wed Feb 11 19:20:22 1998

All,
        Figures I'd be out of town when this topic came up; I'd been
waiting for a quiet moment to ask about them as well.
        I remember *lusting* for a digital group system just before dad
bought a TRS-80 Model 1. (He was right, Tandy made systems for a lot longer
than digital group did. :-()
        digital group chassis had a backplane bus which could accomodate
processor cards carrying any of the 4 processor architectures mentioned by
Sam (6502, 6800, 8080, and the super-powerful chip of the future Z-80).
They offered a storage system using cassette tapes but recording to them
digitally, not tone-encoded, which they called the phi-deck (I think). They
sold a separate cabinet which would hold up to 4 of those, for a pretty
large (for those days) total storage - over a megabyte, if I recall
correctly.
        They sold a fair selection of software. I recall OASIS (sic?) as
the name of one of the operating systems, and OPUS-1 and OPUS-2 as the
names of two levels of a programming language (I think).
        I trashed my promotional literature describing all of this years
and years ago, once we decided to go the TRS-80 route. Sigh. If anyone can
amplify or correct any of this, or better yet has a working system, I'd
love to hear more about it.
        Oh yes, there was a picture of one of the cabinets on the cover of
Byte magazine just before they went out of business. Along with many other
systems, suspended in space around a shattering crystal goblet with the
Title "Breaking the Sound Barrier". The cover story was about computers
with sound-generation capability. This would be maybe 1-2 years after the
introduction of the Z-80, I'd guess, but don't remember better than that.
        More and better information, anyone?
                                                        - Mark
Received on Wed Feb 11 1998 - 19:20:22 GMT