GA General Automation was an American company, founded in 1968 by Larry Goshorn (a former marketing executive and a salesman from
Honeywell
Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building technologies, performance ma ...
), which manufactured
minicomputers
A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...
and industrial controllers.
In 1994, General Automation announced it would be relocating from Anaheim to Irvine. It announced it would be phasing-out its manufacturing operations but would retain its 50 employees.
Products
*GA SPC-12 (Jan 1968)
:*Priced at $6400 and claiming $4,000 worth of free options
:*Totally integrated, binary, parallel, single address processor
:*8-bit data and 12 bit address
:*4,096 words (8 bit bytes) of memory with a 2.2 microsecond cycle time
:*Shared command concept that permits the SPC-12s 8-bit memory to handle 12-bit instructions.
:*Features included a real-time clock, expandable memory to 16K, a teletype interface, a control panel and a priority interrupt
*GA SPC-8 (Nov 1968)
*GA 18/30 (June 1968,
IBM 1800 compatible)
*GA SPC-16/30, /50 & /70 (November 1971)
*GA SPC-16/40, /45, /65 & /85 (January 1972)
*LSI-12/16 (January 1974)
::These computers were initially produced with silicon on sapphire circuit technology provided by
Rockwell International
Rockwell International was a major American manufacturing conglomerate involved in aircraft, the space industry, defense and commercial electronics, components in the automotive industry, printing presses, avionics and industrial products. Ro ...
but yield problems caused a switch to conventional ICs by 1975.
*GA 16/110 & /120 (December 1976)
[*]
*GA 16/220 (July 1978)
*GA 16/330
*GA 16/440
*GA 16/460
*GA Zebra 1700/1750 (Introduced in 1985, a
Motorola 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 Sect ...
computer running
Pick Operating System)
*
Parallel Computers, Inc.
Parallel Computers, Inc. was an American computer manufacturing company, based in Santa Cruz, California, that made fault-tolerant computer systems based around the Unix operating system and various processors in the Motorola 68000 series.
Histor ...
– fault-tolerant supermicro/minicomputer based on Unix, acquired 1987, sold 1988
References
{{Reflist
External links
Computer History MuseumDocuments at Bitsavers18/30 Fortran IV Software Data Sheet
Minicomputers
Defunct computer companies of the United States
Defunct manufacturing companies based in California
Defunct technology companies based in California
Companies based in Anaheim, California
Computer companies established in 1968
Technology companies established in 1968
1968 establishments in California