North Star Horizon

From: Victor the Cleaner <jonathan_at_canuck.com>
Date: Sun Jan 10 03:27:52 1999

Bruce Lane <kyrrin_at_bluefeathertech.com>, a voice of desperation in this
data wilderness, cried:

>Looks like I'm getting a Northstar Horizon box come July. Friend of mine's holding it for me until I can get down south and pick it up.
>Here's what I remember about Horizons: S100 bus, CP/M for an OS, built pretty well.
>More info would be most welcome. My specialties for 'classic' systems are with DEC and Sun.

Close. The Horizon was definitely one of the better-built and more
reliable S100 boxes of the time. 10 slots (I think), and a little
unusual in that the serial and parallel I/O were built into the
motherboard. Most had a wood case.

(I once had to replicate all that stuff on a wirewrap board for a
client who needed more than 10 card slots and had to migrate to a
Cromemco Z2 chassis while maintaining I/O compatibility. I also
discovered with that system that their hard disk - a 14" 20(?)meg
Century drive - suffered from serious read/write problems due to
ground loops. Annoying but solvable. I digress...)

CP/M was available, but not the stock OS. North Star (originally Kentucky
Fried Computers - swear to god) designed their own unique floppy controller
(it was their entry into the S100 market) and had a proprietary OS to go
with it. The controller was a full S100 board to run the 5" drives alone,
and the weird and difficult thing was that they used HARD sectored floppies,
10 sectors per track (not to be confused with the 16 sector floppies used by
Micropolis).

Jonathan
Received on Sun Jan 10 1999 - 03:27:52 GMT