The Northstar Horizon was the first computer I ever got to put my hands on. A classmate's mother brought one in for show & tell when I was in 4th grade, and we got to play "Hunt the Wumpus". Must have been around '78-'79. In the summer of '81 I got a 4K TRS-80 Color Computer.
I used a Horizon running an OS called TurboDOS. It was a multi user CP/M clone. The neat part about it was that it had a hardware component to it. You had one board in the system that was the main master board that had a CPU and RAM on it. The master board may have had a floppy controller and hard drive controller on it as well but I don't remember. You also had slave/client boards which were basically a z80 single board machine with RAM and a serial port. All access to the hard drive and the floppy drive were controlled by the master board. It had a print spooler to allow shared access to the printer. You also user accounts so you had to login to do anything.
Around 1977 the style for consumer Hi Fi units was very much that 2 part wood and aluminium look, so I wonder if North Star just commissioned a manufacturer of HiFi cases to make their case? Since this was focussed at home /small office users maybe they also wanted a design that fitted into the "modern" style that people would also have.
A lot of hobbyist computers looked like this. And a lot were S-100 (even the IMSAI 8080 or Altair 8800). Most of these started as home kit computers - the market was very very small and there were very few retail outlets. I think Northstar - like IMSAI and Altair - even had an optional toggle switch front panel. Stunning to look back at 2Mhz -8 bit -64KByte system with a couple of 360KB floppies and think this was "living large" at the time. I think this config was around $5000-$6000. Moore's Law had not even kicked in yet.
For certain computers the cases were intended for something else. For example, the cases that Proc Tech used for the Sol Computer were originally intended to be used in the construction of digital clocks, so were available much more cheaply than a specifically designed and manufactured case.
In the late 70s the woodgrain aesthetic was everywhere and on everything you can think of, it gave things like "cold" electronic devices like electric can openers a warmer, earthier vibe which the 70s were all about. It quickly became faux woodgrain which as we (well, I guess you have to be of a certain age...) know carried on into the 80s. There was Dynabyte computer from the late 70s that had a faux woodgrain veneer, may have even been something like the contact paper that was used to line shelf (Dollar Tree still sells it ;), though more likely it was painted/printed on. Would love to own that Northstar.
12:59 On the North Star Horizon computer I once had, the cutout was used as an opening for the ribbon cable to through to connect to a third and fourth external floppy drive. The computer ran 8-bit operating systems such as North Star DOS or CP/M.
This really takes me back. In 1978-79, I worked in a computer store part-time while I was in High School. We would buy the North Stars as kits and I and a couple of other guys were tasked with assembling them. So much soldering, but the documentation they furnished for assembly was excellent. Most of the systems I assembled were a little older than the one you have, but the components look all the same. The disk drives advanced faster than anything else. It was always a thrill to power up for the first time and see the red light come on and no smoke. Not to say we didn't have some smoke every once in a while...LOL. Thanks for the memories.
Love the old Hazeltine 1500 terminal. I still have one out in my garage, that I have been unable to get working. Mainly do to a severe lack of effort. I bout a new large multi-pole cap for the monitor, but after I hooked it up, I smoked one of the high voltage resistors, so it went back out into the garage. I also have a large selection of Northstar Software in boxes. However I believe a lot of that was ruined, because it was out in my shed, in the Florida heat. But the folders and manuals still look good. It was just the disks that seem to have been damaged. As far as wooden computer cases goes, my SOL-20 has very nice wood side panels on it. It was manufactured and sole that way.
My dad built an Apple ][ into a printer casing and added a disk drive. He used a Zenith monitor with it; it blew my mind when he told me it could also be used with the television set so that I could play games in color instead of green.
While there is no LSI floppy controller on the board, the controller board does still implement the low level functions that an LSI controller would. It's just made from discrete TTL chips. Kinda like back in the day a "CPU" was made up of several chips on a board instead of one LSI chip. They were very clever in the way they did this using the hard sectored disks to simplify the whole thing along with PROMs to implement more complex logic functions. This board uses memory mapped IO in a very unique way. The most significant byte of the address is used to pick the function you want (read/write/step/etc) and the least significant byte is the data. The logic on the motherboard is just for the serial and parallel ports (as well as some bus termination).
@@RetroHackShack Thanks for the video! I really enjoyed it. I don't have a Horizon, but I have other s100 systems. Working on repairing one of these floppy boards right now!
My first computer in 1979! 32Mb ram, dual floppy (double sided, hard sector) and North Star Horizon OS. Did the job great, complete with the Hazeltine monitor. Imported assembled from a dealer in New York. Later upgraded it to 64Mb so that it would ruin CP/M.
Actually, the SWTPc was not built on the S-100 bus, but its own, Motorola-oriented bus called the SS-50/SS-30. It became a de-facto standard of its own, as companies like Smoke Signal Broadcasting and GIMIX made expansion boards and entire computer systems around, in addition to SWTP.
Many thanks for this video. I wanted to mention that Soroc IQ 120 terminals were very commonly used with the Horizon, as Northstar sold them with their systems. Also, Northstar sold a very interesting floating-point board, available for the Horizon (or any other S-100 machine), which used only TTL and microcode and allowed up to 14 digits of binary-coded decimals. Enthusiasts willing to write code for it could get some pretty amazing numeric performance out of it (for a microcomputer of that era). Northstar offered a BASIC interpreter which made rather inefficient use of it. There was also a third-party BASIC interpreter for it called Micro Mike's BaZic.
On the North Star ad page is the address of the Tucson, AZ Byte Shop I visited many times to drool over computers I wasn't willing to spend the huge amount required to buy. I definitely recall one of these units there. The one I most wanted was the Exidy Sorcerer with its sexy case. I almost bought a Kim-1 there, but instead bought the Heathkit ET-3400 microprocessor trainer with its absolutely OUTSTANDING course materials.
I remember that Byte cover by Robert Tinney. He did a lot of Byte covers. It is a play on Pascal's Triangle, which is a triangular array of the binomial coefficients. Computing the triangle was an early application for personal computers.
I like your 1977 Byte magazines. I have the full year from 1977 of BYTE magazines. It is a coincidence that I recently loaded a BASIC program, that would draw the same patter found on the November issue. Using my Commodore 64. 10 PRINT CHR$(205+INT(RND(1)*2)); 20 GOTO 10
The serial add-in S100 Card - the HSIO4 - was a 4 port serial expansion card that offered Synchronous and Asynchronous Serial expansion with RS232 or RS485 with an additional module. It had ribbon cables with chassis mount DB25 connectors. Northstar sold a multiuser OS called TurboDOS that supported timesharing of the processor. I think they also supported Digital Research (CP/M) multiuser version MP/M. Northstar also sold a Floating Point processing card and accounting software. The combination of all this was it was a turnkey solution for bookkeeping. This computer - with all its power and expansion slots was very popular at Engineering schools. Prototype cards for CAD, Data Acquisition, etc etc were not unusual. The company developed an all in one system - the Advantage - that pursued the business market (home computing was not a thing yet). And when IBM entered the market they pivoted to making PC clones for a while with short-lived success.
Apple did indeed offer a board only version of the Apple II that users could use to upgrade their Apple I systems to an Apple II. They also continued offering upgrade paths like this going so far as to even offer motherboard/logic board that could be used to upgrade an Apple II into a IIGS. That is actually why IIGS boards have a (usually unpopulated) connector for older Apple II keyboards on them.
Very nice video, thank you! There are lots of videos about Altair and IMSAI out there, but to my knowledge this and the next are the only ones about North Star. Too bad this Horizon doesn't have the FP board, I would love to see it operating under North Star FPBasic.
Calling things Ketucky Fried was a bit of a joke in the late 70's and early 80's. There was even a Kentucky Fried change of video rental shops at one point.
The local computer museum has a wall with every cover of BYTE magazine. For its first few years it was all esoteric concept art until all of a sudden it was all actual hardware.
Looking forward to the next episode! The lack of any obvious ROMs is interesting - presumably it has to boot from disk? - I know you mentioned it could run DOS or CP/M.
@@RetroHackShack OS options for 8080/Z80 based S-100 systems were: CP/M, MP/M, Concurrent CP/M, Multi-User System Executive (MUSE), and probably some other obscure off-shoots of these. I'm sure other operating systems could be ran on S-100 by other processors, but I never saw it done.
I used to work on electronics in the 80's and ESD protection was pretty much mandatory when handling boards such as those, especially RAM. I don't often see such precautions nowadays when handling retro equipment.
I have an esd mat and bracelet on my other bench. Honestly though, I have never had an issue working on cement floor with a wooden bench either. That is my setup in the garage.
Single-sided single density North Star floppies are ~90k. Double dense (also single sided) would be ~180k. "Quad density" is just their name for a double-sided double-dense disk... so a North Star "quad density" disk would store ~360k
hi, about the wood case: what about the SOL-20, that was marketed in 1976 and that got two sides in real wood too? Nice video and nice machine by the way :-)
The Northstar Horizon, it was built in 1977 from a kit and was the first computer I ever saw, but I was a small boy and the computer was my grandfather's and I was not to go near it. I would not have remembered his first terminal, but later I learned that it was a Teletype 33. I would have seen it with a Heathkit H19. He used the computer to run his law practice. Unfortunately the old computers were lost a house fire in the late '80s. I would love to get my hands a Horizon and H19 one of these days, but whew, in serviceable condition, they are pricy.
Most of the content for Byte was written way ahead of time. I think the yellow pages were late breaking news which could be bound in at the last minute.
32K! 32K! OK, without a control panel the CPU board had jump to the boot ROM (CC00hex?) on the floppy controller. The funny thing about The North Star Horizon floppy controller was that it was a read only device and it came in two versions, Single Density and Double Density. It occupied 1K of address space in high memory. The memory space was divided into 4 blocks. The first was the boot ROM and the second was just the mirror of the boot. The third block was the control and data block. The last block was the write data block using the address’ to write the data to the floppy controller. When the CPU was ready, to write data or read data, the controller would assert a memory wait until the data was ready I/O. This was very CPU intensive and interrupts where not allowed as this would ruin the timing of the read or write of the data sector. You also need a scheme to avoid the memory conflict with any RAM board in the same address field. That’s very much how it worked. The floppies & drives came in single density single sided at 90k. Double density single side was 180k and Quad density double sided was 360k.
I think I will. I used to have a NS with a hard drive. 5MB I think. I gave it away and immediately regretted it. I traded some consulting for the one I have now. It worked when I put it into storage and I have an RS232 Terminal. Do you have a copy of Northstar DOS? Then I used to normally load Northstar Word (I think it was). I have the manuals and the disks. I also have a rebuilt disk drive that I had rebuilt and left in the plastic package. The big thing that was the difference in North Star Disk was that the drives were hard sectored. All the other S100s were soft sectored. Greg
The wired jumper on the CPU board is indeed for the power on jump address. For the double dense controller that you have, I believe this would be E800h. The CPU board PROM is not needed for the Horizon as the boot code is stored in a PROM on the floppy controller (this is the jump address that is programmed on your CPU). This code in the FDC PROM just reads the first file on the disc into ram at 2000h and then jumps to it.
@@RetroHackShack Unofficial slogan if you will. It was referring to the fact that at least at some point they were rushing production just to get products out the door and that quality checks were secondary
I modified the 64K ram board by repopulating with 64K chips giving 256K and then wrote an XIOS to run MP/M 2.0 for four terminal operation of CP/M software.
Almost choked on my coffee when you said 32mb of RAM. According to a google search 64k of RAM in 1980 was ~$400. 32,000,000/64000=500 500*$400=$200,000 in 1980 dollars. In 2023 dollars that would equal ~ $774,000. No telling how much space 32mb in 1980 would have taken up and aforementioned cost is just the RAM, doesn't include whatever it would take, boards connectors and whatnot, to support that much RAM.
The SWTPC products that feature the Motorola 6800 (or later, the Motorola 6809) use the SS50 bus, combined with the SS30 bus for certain sections of memory. They DO NOT use the S100 bus. Their 68000 based systems used the SS64 bus. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWTPC
"Kentucky Fried Computers"- with 7 secret IC's and Registers 😀 what I think is interesting, is that the Processor is on a card that plugs into a backplane rather then on a motherboard. which makes me wonder if they had other processor boards with a larger/faster processor for an upgrade. and if the one that is in this system is already one of this type.
Watching your magazine descriptions.... The SWTPC was 6800 based and not S100 (Adrian's Digital Basement had a couple episodes on it). The S100 systems were originally Intel 8080 based, but later upgraded to the ZiLOG Z80. The Z80 could execute 8080 code, but not the other way around.. The Z80 was far more advanced. Early CP/M was written in 8080 machine code, and both the 8080 and Z80 could run it. However, if CP/M software was written for Z80 specific code, then it would not work for the 8080. The Z80 was a technological upgrade to the 8080 in speed, registers, and op-codes, as well as DRAM support. Former Intel engineers formed ZiLOG and the Z80 was the middle finger to Intel's 8080.
The editorial explains the cover: since it was a special issue about the Pascal programming language they created a visual representation for the various languages and the calm area was supposed to be "Pascal's Triangle" (a well known number sequence). For the 1981 special issue about Smalltalk the Xerox Parc people asked Robert Tinney to show a balloon escaping the island he had painted in the 1978 cover.
@@RetroHackShack This section of Byte also used low quality black and white pictures while the rest of the magazine was color. But given that it was always just a tiny part of the magazine I am not sure if the savings were that significant.
One additional thought: perhaps it was more about lead time than cost. The rest of the magazine had to be ready several months in advance, but maybe this part could accept last minute changes?
Makes me want to get out my old North Star and see if I can get it running again. Curse You! (just joking) I have so many old projects, it makes me crazy.
I worked on several wooden boxed computers, including this NS Horizon. It is not a PC, it might have 20 users attached. We called them Micro Computers as they ran on one or more Microprocessors. PCs were for individuals. The magazines followed on from computers getting popular, but the computer industry was already buying and selling computer hardware and software. Dynabyte computers were popular and started with real wood verneer, that turned over time into wood type plastic but still looked good. S100 card cages ended up in all types of furniture. Desks, cabinets, wardrobe style wooden racks etc. Apple's contribution was to reduce the price to make it all available to the masses. Micro computers were an industry before Apple existed. You are just too young!
I thought it was because it's heavily used by KFC staff. Imagine there are more computer companies like Carl's Jr. Computers. But then if the sole owner was actually named Carl Jr., would he get sued? 😭
@@RetroHackShack I suspect they may have done that because the Imsai just screamed "This is a Computer", with all the blinkenlights and switches, while the home computer trend was to make things that looked more like friendly appliances, and less stereotypically computery. Microcomputers were still new enough, that movie audiences might not recognize a TRS-80 or Apple ][ as a computer, but what else could an Imsai be?
The Northstar Horizon was the first computer I ever got to put my hands on. A classmate's mother brought one in for show & tell when I was in 4th grade, and we got to play "Hunt the Wumpus". Must have been around '78-'79. In the summer of '81 I got a 4K TRS-80 Color Computer.
Very cool.
I used a Horizon running an OS called TurboDOS. It was a multi user CP/M clone. The neat part about it was that it had a hardware component to it. You had one board in the system that was the main master board that had a CPU and RAM on it. The master board may have had a floppy controller and hard drive controller on it as well but I don't remember. You also had slave/client boards which were basically a z80 single board machine with RAM and a serial port. All access to the hard drive and the floppy drive were controlled by the master board. It had a print spooler to allow shared access to the printer. You also user accounts so you had to login to do anything.
I remember the Byte Shop selling Northstars with Hazeltine 1500s. Their floor demo was running the Whatsit database
Around 1977 the style for consumer Hi Fi units was very much that 2 part wood and aluminium look, so I wonder if North Star just commissioned a manufacturer of HiFi cases to make their case? Since this was focussed at home /small office users maybe they also wanted a design that fitted into the "modern" style that people would also have.
Yeah. That's very possible.
That was my first thought too - the styling is exactly the same as HiFi equipment from the same time period.
A lot of hobbyist computers looked like this. And a lot were S-100 (even the IMSAI 8080 or Altair 8800). Most of these started as home kit computers - the market was very very small and there were very few retail outlets. I think Northstar - like IMSAI and Altair - even had an optional toggle switch front panel. Stunning to look back at 2Mhz -8 bit -64KByte system with a couple of 360KB floppies and think this was "living large" at the time. I think this config was around $5000-$6000. Moore's Law had not even kicked in yet.
For certain computers the cases were intended for something else. For example, the cases that Proc Tech used for the Sol Computer were originally intended to be used in the construction of digital clocks, so were available much more cheaply than a specifically designed and manufactured case.
In the late 70s the woodgrain aesthetic was everywhere and on everything you can think of, it gave things like "cold" electronic devices like electric can openers a warmer, earthier vibe which the 70s were all about. It quickly became faux woodgrain which as we (well, I guess you have to be of a certain age...) know carried on into the 80s. There was Dynabyte computer from the late 70s that had a faux woodgrain veneer, may have even been something like the contact paper that was used to line shelf (Dollar Tree still sells it ;), though more likely it was painted/printed on. Would love to own that Northstar.
12:59 On the North Star Horizon computer I once had, the cutout was used as an opening for the ribbon cable to through to connect to a third and fourth external floppy drive. The computer ran 8-bit operating systems such as North Star DOS or CP/M.
This really takes me back. In 1978-79, I worked in a computer store part-time while I was in High School. We would buy the North Stars as kits and I and a couple of other guys were tasked with assembling them. So much soldering, but the documentation they furnished for assembly was excellent. Most of the systems I assembled were a little older than the one you have, but the components look all the same. The disk drives advanced faster than anything else. It was always a thrill to power up for the first time and see the red light come on and no smoke. Not to say we didn't have some smoke every once in a while...LOL. Thanks for the memories.
This one certainly held up well!
Love the old Hazeltine 1500 terminal. I still have one out in my garage, that I have been unable to get working. Mainly do to a severe lack of effort.
I bout a new large multi-pole cap for the monitor, but after I hooked it up, I smoked one of the high voltage resistors, so it went back out into the garage.
I also have a large selection of Northstar Software in boxes. However I believe a lot of that was ruined, because it was out in my shed, in the Florida heat.
But the folders and manuals still look good. It was just the disks that seem to have been damaged.
As far as wooden computer cases goes, my SOL-20 has very nice wood side panels on it. It was manufactured and sole that way.
I forgot about the sol when I was recording.
@@RetroHackShack You even pointed out the SOL in the BYTE Magazine that you were looking at...
My dad built an Apple ][ into a printer casing and added a disk drive. He used a Zenith monitor with it; it blew my mind when he told me it could also be used with the television set so that I could play games in color instead of green.
13:00 The unpopulated slot is for external floppy disk drives. Mine actually has it populated, but I never found the external drive in the lot.
Cool
While there is no LSI floppy controller on the board, the controller board does still implement the low level functions that an LSI controller would. It's just made from discrete TTL chips. Kinda like back in the day a "CPU" was made up of several chips on a board instead of one LSI chip. They were very clever in the way they did this using the hard sectored disks to simplify the whole thing along with PROMs to implement more complex logic functions. This board uses memory mapped IO in a very unique way. The most significant byte of the address is used to pick the function you want (read/write/step/etc) and the least significant byte is the data. The logic on the motherboard is just for the serial and parallel ports (as well as some bus termination).
Thanks for the info
@@RetroHackShack Thanks for the video! I really enjoyed it. I don't have a Horizon, but I have other s100 systems. Working on repairing one of these floppy boards right now!
My first computer in 1979! 32Mb ram, dual floppy (double sided, hard sector) and North Star Horizon OS. Did the job great, complete with the Hazeltine monitor. Imported assembled from a dealer in New York. Later upgraded it to 64Mb so that it would ruin CP/M.
Actually, the SWTPc was not built on the S-100 bus, but its own, Motorola-oriented bus called the SS-50/SS-30. It became a de-facto standard of its own, as companies like Smoke Signal Broadcasting and GIMIX made expansion boards and entire computer systems around, in addition to SWTP.
I always assumed it was S100. Thanks.
Many thanks for this video. I wanted to mention that Soroc IQ 120 terminals were very commonly used with the Horizon, as Northstar sold them with their systems. Also, Northstar sold a very interesting floating-point board, available for the Horizon (or any other S-100 machine), which used only TTL and microcode and allowed up to 14 digits of binary-coded decimals. Enthusiasts willing to write code for it could get some pretty amazing numeric performance out of it (for a microcomputer of that era). Northstar offered a BASIC interpreter which made rather inefficient use of it. There was also a third-party BASIC interpreter for it called Micro Mike's BaZic.
Thanks for all the info!
On the North Star ad page is the address of the Tucson, AZ Byte Shop I visited many times to drool over computers I wasn't willing to spend the huge amount required to buy. I definitely recall one of these units there. The one I most wanted was the Exidy Sorcerer with its sexy case. I almost bought a Kim-1 there, but instead bought the Heathkit ET-3400 microprocessor trainer with its absolutely OUTSTANDING course materials.
Awesome
I remember that Byte cover by Robert Tinney. He did a lot of Byte covers. It is a play on Pascal's Triangle, which is a triangular array of the binomial coefficients. Computing the triangle was an early application for personal computers.
Those covers are so cool
That system looks to be in great shape..
Looking forward to the next video.
Thanks 👍
I like your 1977 Byte magazines. I have the full year from 1977 of BYTE magazines. It is a coincidence that I recently loaded a BASIC program, that would draw the same patter found on the November issue. Using my Commodore 64.
10 PRINT CHR$(205+INT(RND(1)*2));
20 GOTO 10
Yep. That's a classic.
The serial add-in S100 Card - the HSIO4 - was a 4 port serial expansion card that offered Synchronous and Asynchronous Serial expansion with RS232 or RS485 with an additional module. It had ribbon cables with chassis mount DB25 connectors. Northstar sold a multiuser OS called TurboDOS that supported timesharing of the processor. I think they also supported Digital Research (CP/M) multiuser version MP/M. Northstar also sold a Floating Point processing card and accounting software. The combination of all this was it was a turnkey solution for bookkeeping. This computer - with all its power and expansion slots was very popular at Engineering schools. Prototype cards for CAD, Data Acquisition, etc etc were not unusual. The company developed an all in one system - the Advantage - that pursued the business market (home computing was not a thing yet). And when IBM entered the market they pivoted to making PC clones for a while with short-lived success.
Apple did indeed offer a board only version of the Apple II that users could use to upgrade their Apple I systems to an Apple II.
They also continued offering upgrade paths like this going so far as to even offer motherboard/logic board that could be used to upgrade an Apple II into a IIGS. That is actually why IIGS boards have a (usually unpopulated) connector for older Apple II keyboards on them.
Thanks for confirming that.
Very nice video, thank you! There are lots of videos about Altair and IMSAI out there, but to my knowledge this and the next are the only ones about North Star. Too bad this Horizon doesn't have the FP board, I would love to see it operating under North Star FPBasic.
Thanks
They could've chosen the name Kentucky Fried Computers after the Kentucky Fried Theater improv group who later made the Kentucky Fried Movie.
Movie was released in August 1977, so maybe?
Calling things Ketucky Fried was a bit of a joke in the late 70's and early 80's. There was even a Kentucky Fried change of video rental shops at one point.
Univ. of Wisconsin alums (Zucker Bros) … who went on to make: Airplane!
Whelp, now I have to watch wargames again !
The local computer museum has a wall with every cover of BYTE magazine. For its first few years it was all esoteric concept art until all of a sudden it was all actual hardware.
I love those covers
The SWTPC machine in the ad @ 3:07 isn't an S-100 machine. The buss is specific to SWTPC, one is 50 pin, the other 30 pin.
Thanks
The title almost got me :))
Fortunately the computer did not get "fried" :))
LOL. I did that before to my Apple iic :)
Are you playing TAV in the background?
Kick Ass. Computer
I can’t wait to get S100 system for the collection.
Yeah. It's my first S100.
@@RetroHackShack Cool. It’s a race, either a S100 system, or PDP 11/70 Qbus.
Still equally Unique
God Bless.
Looking forward to the next episode! The lack of any obvious ROMs is interesting - presumably it has to boot from disk? - I know you mentioned it could run DOS or CP/M.
Yeah. If you look at the CPU card you can add a PROM there to boot from. I might try that.
@@RetroHackShack OS options for 8080/Z80 based S-100 systems were: CP/M, MP/M, Concurrent CP/M, Multi-User System Executive (MUSE), and probably some other obscure off-shoots of these. I'm sure other operating systems could be ran on S-100 by other processors, but I never saw it done.
Cool
The floppy controller has the boot PROM. It just reads the first file of the disk into 2000h and jumps to it.
I used to work on electronics in the 80's and ESD protection was pretty much mandatory when handling boards such as those, especially RAM. I don't often see such precautions nowadays when handling retro equipment.
I have an esd mat and bracelet on my other bench. Honestly though, I have never had an issue working on cement floor with a wooden bench either. That is my setup in the garage.
slot by fan is for a 34-pin connector for external drive(s), also, the Z80 can run 8080 code. N* software defaults to hazeltine terminal settings.
Thanks
Single-sided single density North Star floppies are ~90k. Double dense (also single sided) would be ~180k. "Quad density" is just their name for a double-sided double-dense disk... so a North Star "quad density" disk would store ~360k
Thanks for clarifying
hi, about the wood case: what about the SOL-20, that was marketed in 1976 and that got two sides in real wood too? Nice video and nice machine by the way :-)
Thanks
in a multi-user (time-share) environment with those serial ports fully populated, the N* would have been running MP/M rather than CP/M
That filter capacitor is terrifying, lol.
The Northstar Horizon, it was built in 1977 from a kit and was the first computer I ever saw, but I was a small boy and the computer was my grandfather's and I was not to go near it. I would not have remembered his first terminal, but later I learned that it was a Teletype 33. I would have seen it with a Heathkit H19. He used the computer to run his law practice.
Unfortunately the old computers were lost a house fire in the late '80s. I would love to get my hands a Horizon and H19 one of these days, but whew, in serviceable condition, they are pricy.
Most of the content for Byte was written way ahead of time. I think the yellow pages were late breaking news which could be bound in at the last minute.
legit wood grain....awesome find..
32K! 32K!
OK, without a control panel the CPU board had jump to the boot ROM (CC00hex?) on the floppy controller. The funny thing about The North Star Horizon floppy controller was that it was a read only device and it came in two versions, Single Density and Double Density. It occupied 1K of address space in high memory. The memory space was divided into 4 blocks. The first was the boot ROM and the second was just the mirror of the boot. The third block was the control and data block. The last block was the write data block using the address’ to write the data to the floppy controller. When the CPU was ready, to write data or read data, the controller would assert a memory wait until the data was ready I/O. This was very CPU intensive and interrupts where not allowed as this would ruin the timing of the read or write of the data sector. You also need a scheme to avoid the memory conflict with any RAM board in the same address field. That’s very much how it worked. The floppies & drives came in single density single sided at 90k. Double density single side was 180k and Quad density double sided was 360k.
I think I will. I used to have a NS with a hard drive. 5MB I think. I gave it away and immediately regretted it. I traded some consulting for the one I have now. It worked when I put it into storage and I have an RS232 Terminal.
Do you have a copy of Northstar DOS?
Then I used to normally load Northstar Word (I think it was). I have the manuals and the disks. I also have a rebuilt disk drive that I had rebuilt and left in the plastic package.
The big thing that was the difference in North Star Disk was that the drives were hard sectored. All the other S100s were soft sectored.
Greg
Smoke Signal Broadcasting had a 6809 PC that had a wood cover.
The wired jumper on the CPU board is indeed for the power on jump address. For the double dense controller that you have, I believe this would be E800h. The CPU board PROM is not needed for the Horizon as the boot code is stored in a PROM on the floppy controller (this is the jump address that is programmed on your CPU). This code in the FDC PROM just reads the first file on the disc into ram at 2000h and then jumps to it.
Beautiful machines I really gotta go to a e waste more lol
A long time ago I worked with a guy who worked at North Star and would routinely say "North Star: the quality goes in before the label falls off!"
Must have been a corporate slogan or something. What does that even mean?
@@RetroHackShack Unofficial slogan if you will. It was referring to the fact that at least at some point they were rushing production just to get products out the door and that quality checks were secondary
I modified the 64K ram board by repopulating with 64K chips giving 256K and then wrote an XIOS to run MP/M 2.0 for four terminal operation of CP/M software.
Nice
I worked on a NorthStar Horizon!
What did you use it for?
Almost choked on my coffee when you said 32mb of RAM. According to a google search 64k of RAM in 1980 was ~$400. 32,000,000/64000=500 500*$400=$200,000 in 1980 dollars. In 2023 dollars that would equal ~ $774,000. No telling how much space 32mb in 1980 would have taken up and aforementioned cost is just the RAM, doesn't include whatever it would take, boards connectors and whatnot, to support that much RAM.
Look for the Zeus 2 from OSM Computer Corporation. The one we had (can't say where) had a substantial burled walnut top.
Thanks for the tip! I'll check it out.
First computer I ever used.
The SWTPC products that feature the Motorola 6800 (or later, the Motorola 6809) use the SS50 bus, combined with the SS30 bus for certain sections of memory. They DO NOT use the S100 bus. Their 68000 based systems used the SS64 bus.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWTPC
So The Kentucky Fried Movie never had to change its name and the computers store did.
"Kentucky Fried Computers"- with 7 secret IC's and Registers 😀
what I think is interesting, is that the Processor is on a card that plugs into
a backplane rather then on a motherboard. which makes me wonder if they
had other processor boards with a larger/faster processor for an upgrade.
and if the one that is in this system is already one of this type.
in computer class back in 85, we had //e's and we had some paddles, I don't recall if they were apple branded though.
Nice. I need to find some.
Watching your magazine descriptions.... The SWTPC was 6800 based and not S100 (Adrian's Digital Basement had a couple episodes on it). The S100 systems were originally Intel 8080 based, but later upgraded to the ZiLOG Z80. The Z80 could execute 8080 code, but not the other way around.. The Z80 was far more advanced. Early CP/M was written in 8080 machine code, and both the 8080 and Z80 could run it. However, if CP/M software was written for Z80 specific code, then it would not work for the 8080. The Z80 was a technological upgrade to the 8080 in speed, registers, and op-codes, as well as DRAM support. Former Intel engineers formed ZiLOG and the Z80 was the middle finger to Intel's 8080.
Cool. Thanks for the info.
Didn't the SOL-20 also have wooden sides? Not the whole case, but a substantial part of it.
Yes. I guess that's true.
I like your channel more than LGR. At least you interact with commenters.
To be fair, I have a lot less comments at the moment 😊 I hope I can still keep up with it as the channel grows.
@@RetroHackShack You also listen to suggestions and have a great sense of humor.
Thanks!
The cover of byte with the boys is meant to be magnetic computer memory I think
That's probably it
The editorial explains the cover: since it was a special issue about the Pascal programming language they created a visual representation for the various languages and the calm area was supposed to be "Pascal's Triangle" (a well known number sequence). For the 1981 special issue about Smalltalk the Xerox Parc people asked Robert Tinney to show a balloon escaping the island he had painted in the 1978 cover.
Thanks. I missed the explanation in the magazine.
The back pages of Byte have not yellowed - they were originally light orangish, though how light would vary from issue to issue.
This has to be cost savings right? I wonder how much they actually saved by doing that.
@@RetroHackShack This section of Byte also used low quality black and white pictures while the rest of the magazine was color. But given that it was always just a tiny part of the magazine I am not sure if the savings were that significant.
One additional thought: perhaps it was more about lead time than cost. The rest of the magazine had to be ready several months in advance, but maybe this part could accept last minute changes?
What were the chips XEROX was selling? there was an ad for them on the opposite page from the Apple II ad.
archive.org/details/BYTE_Vol_02-11_1977-11_Sweet_16/mode/2up?q=northstar+horizon
Makes me want to get out my old North Star and see if I can get it running again.
Curse You! (just joking) I have so many old projects, it makes me crazy.
Do it!
the Processor Technology SOL-20 has solid wood sides.
At 15:18 you can see some of the Northstar software folders, like the ones I have here.
so the SOL-20 escaped your research for cases with wooden parts? hm? :)
Aux out is for a terminal connected serial printer
I worked on several wooden boxed computers, including this NS Horizon. It is not a PC, it might have 20 users attached. We called them Micro Computers as they ran on one or more Microprocessors. PCs were for individuals. The magazines followed on from computers getting popular, but the computer industry was already buying and selling computer hardware and software. Dynabyte computers were popular and started with real wood verneer, that turned over time into wood type plastic but still looked good. S100 card cages ended up in all types of furniture. Desks, cabinets, wardrobe style wooden racks etc. Apple's contribution was to reduce the price to make it all available to the masses. Micro computers were an industry before Apple existed. You are just too young!
Thanks for sharing that info
am i crazy or did you not even turn it on.
Make sure you watch both parts 😉
I thought it was because it's heavily used by KFC staff.
Imagine there are more computer companies like Carl's Jr. Computers. But then if the sole owner was actually named Carl Jr., would he get sued? 😭
Never had an S100 system....but I want to get an Imsai. ..not so much to run it but for Nostalgia for WarGames.
Yeah. I have a friend that has one. It's strange that they used that for war games when it was already pretty outdated at the time.
@@RetroHackShack I suspect they may have done that because the Imsai just screamed "This is a Computer", with all the blinkenlights and switches, while the home computer trend was to make things that looked more like friendly appliances, and less stereotypically computery. Microcomputers were still new enough, that movie audiences might not recognize a TRS-80 or Apple ][ as a computer, but what else could an Imsai be?
SOL20 came with wooden sides.
OHHHHHWEEE
Arrogant much?