On Flames and Mailing lists, and a bit about

From: Jack Peacock <peacock_at_simconv.com>
Date: Thu Mar 19 17:17:26 1998

Marty wrote:
> very interested in learning about the history of the company
itself. I
> read everything I can find on early microcomputer companies
and find
> it fascinating reading.


Northstar got its start, I think in late 1976, with one of the
first affordable and reliable floppy disk systems for S-100s.
It used the then brand new 5.25" floppy disk Shugart had just
started making, matched to an S-100 controller board. Up to
that time all the floppy systems were based on 8" floppies,
which went for, oh, around $1000-$1500 for a drive (and weren't
very reliable either). The NS drive was very cheap in
comparison, I think around $500, but bets of all you just put it
in the box and it worked, very rare for S-100 machines in that
timeframe.

The drive was single density, single sided, hard sectored with
10 sectors of 256 bytes each, total around 90KB. Paltry
compared to the 243KB on an 8" drive, but infinitely better than
a Tarbell cassette interface. The drive came with a crude
operating system (CP/M didn't work right away because of
hardware problems with the boot ROM on the NS controller) and
Basic. Eventually Lifeboat got a version of CP/M working with
the drive.

After the floppy subsystem, NS came out with a unique S-100
floating point coprocessor board. This was actually a sort of
bit slice state machine that did BCD arithmetic. A very clever
design but somewhat difficult to use. It was fast for it's
time. The only software that used it (to my knowledge) was the
NS basic and I think one of the CBASIC or PASCAL compilers
(Sorcim?).

NS made enough from their floppy systems that they started
making whole machines, the Horizon and later the Advantage. As
with all the S-100 companies, PC's killed them off.
        Jack Peacock
Received on Thu Mar 19 1998 - 17:17:26 GMT