Alpha Microsystems, Inc., often shortened to Alpha Micro, was an American computer company founded in California in 1977. The company was founded in 1977 in
Costa Mesa, California
Costa Mesa (; Spanish for "Table Coast") is a city in Orange County, California. Since its incorporation in 1953, the city has grown from a semi-rural farming community of 16,840 to an urban area including part of the South Coast Plaza–John Wa ...
, by John French, Dick Wilcox and Bob Hitchcock. During the
dot-com boom
The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet.
Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compos ...
, the company changed its name to AlphaServ, then NQL Inc., reflecting its pivot toward being a provider of Internet software. However, the company soon reverted to its original Alpha Microsystems name after the dot-com bubble burst. The company officially went defunct in 2018.
Products
The first Alpha Micro computer was the S-100 AM-100, based upon the WD16 microprocessor chipset from
Western Digital
Western Digital Corporation (WDC, commonly known as Western Digital or WD) is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology produc ...
. Later computers starting with the AM-100/L and the AM-1000 were based on the
Motorola
Motorola, Inc. () was an American Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent p ...
68000
The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Secto ...
and succeeding processors, though Alpha Micro swapped several addressing lines to create byte-ordering compatibility with their earlier processor.
Early
peripheral
A peripheral or peripheral device is an auxiliary device used to put information into and get information out of a computer. The term ''peripheral device'' refers to all hardware components that are attached to a computer and are controlled by the ...
s included standard
Computer terminal
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. The teletype was an example of an early-day hard-copy terminal and ...
s (such models as Soroc,
Hazeltine 1500
The Hazeltine 1500 was a popular smart terminal introduced by Hazeltine Corporation in April 1977 at a price of . Using a microprocessor and semiconductor random access memory, it implemented the basic features of the earlier Hazeltine 2000 in a ...
, and
Wyse
WYSE (970 AM) is a radio station located in Canton, North Carolina, that simulcasts WISE's sports format from Asheville, North Carolina. Owned by the Asheville Radio Group subsidiary of Saga Communications, the station is licensed by the Fede ...
WY50), Fortran
punch card reader
A computer punched card reader or just computer card reader is a computer input device used to read computer programs in either source or executable form and data from punched cards. A computer card punch is a computer output device that punches ...
s, 100
baud rate
In telecommunication and electronics, baud (; symbol: Bd) is a common unit of measurement of symbol rate, which is one of the components that determine the speed of communication over a data channel.
It is the unit for symbol rate or modul ...
acoustic coupler
In telecommunications, an acoustic coupler is an interface device for coupling electrical signals by acoustical means—usually into and out of a telephone.
The link is achieved through converting electric signals from the phone line to sound a ...
modems (later upgraded to 300 baud modems), and 10 MB
CDC
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States. It is a United States federal agency, under the Department of Health and Human Services, and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgi ...
Hawk
hard drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...
s with removable
disk pack
Disk packs and disk cartridges were early forms of removable media for computer data storage, introduced in the 1960s.
Disk pack
A disk pack is a layered grouping of hard disk platters (circular, rigid discs coated with a magnetic data storage ...
s.
The company's primary claim to fame was selling inexpensive minicomputers that provided multi-user power using a proprietary operating system called AMOS (
Alpha Micro Operating System
Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whic ...
). The operating system on the 68000 machines was called AMOS/L. The operating system had major similarities to the operating system of the DEC
PDP-11
The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold, ...
. This may not be coincidental; legend has it that the founders based their operating system on "borrowed" source code from DEC, and DEC, perceiving the same, unsuccessfully tried to sue Alpha Micro over the similarities in 1984.Moore, Steve (6/1984). "Here come the clones." ''AMUS.LOG'', p67.
As Motorola stopped developing their 68000 product, Alpha Micro started to move to the
x86
x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...
CPU family, used in common PCs. This was initially done with the Falcon cards, allowing standard DOS and later Windows-based PCs to run AMOS applications on the 68000-series CPU on the Falcon card. The work done on AMPC became the foundation for AMOS 8.x, which runs natively on x86, but includes a 68K emulator to run older software in a method similar to
Apple Inc.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...
's
Mac 68k emulator
The Mac 68k emulator is a software emulator built into all versions of the classic Mac OS for PowerPC. This emulator enabled running applications and system code that were originally written for the 680x0-based Macintosh models. With a few exceptio ...
for
PowerPC
PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...
.
For application development, AMOS used a proprietary BASIC-like language called
AlphaBASIC
AlphaBASIC is a computer programming language created by Alpha Microsystems in 1976. The language was written by Alpha Microsystems employees Paul Edelstein, Dick Wilcox and Bob Courier.AlphaFortran, AlphaLisp and AlphaPascal.
In the past, Alpha Micro bundled their operating system and tools such as BASIC and their
ISAM
ISAM (an acronym for indexed sequential access method) is a method for creating, maintaining, and manipulating computer files of data so that records can be retrieved sequentially or randomly by one or more keys. Indexes of key fields are mainta ...
implementation as part of the hardware sale, also providing patches and OS upgrades for free or at minimal cost. Gradually, Alpha Micro has transitioned to charging for their software as hardware becomes more of a commodity item.
The Alpha Microsystems package often included software that allow traditional multi-user systems, like AMOS and others such as
Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core. The Sun radiates this energy mainly as light, ultraviolet, and infrared radi ...
IBM mainframe
IBM mainframes are large computer systems produced by IBM since 1952. During the 1960s and 1970s, IBM dominated the large computer market. Current mainframe computers in IBM's line of business computers are developments of the basic design of th ...
s to interface with the
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
graphical user interface
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...
and supported peripherals. This software functioned similar to
Citrix
Citrix Systems, Inc. is an American multinational cloud computing and virtualization technology company that provides server, application and desktop virtualization, networking, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing technologies. C ...
or the
X Window System
The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.
X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wit ...
.
The Alpha Micro computer has never achieved mainstream name recognition, though it has been traditionally popular in certain vertical markets, particularly medical, law, and dental offices.
There were two organizations which produced periodic newsletters and held annual meetings; AMUS (Alpha Micro Users Society), and IAMDA (International Alpha Micro Dealer's Association). It was typically at these annual meetings that the latest hardware and software products were announced by Alpha Microsystems and third party developers.