North Star Computers Inc. (later styled as NorthStar) was an American computer company based in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and E ...

existing between June 1976 (when according to popular rumor it was formed as "Kentucky Fried Computers") and 1989. Originally a mail order business for

IMSAI IMS Associates, Inc., or IMSAI, was a microcomputer company, responsible for one of the earliest successes in personal computing, the IMSAI 8080. The company was founded in 1973 by William Millard and was based in San Leandro, California. Their f ...

computers, it soon developed into a major player in the early microcomputer market, becoming first known for their low-cost floppy disk system for

S-100 bus The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE 696-1983 ''(withdrawn)'', is an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800. The bus was the first industry standard expansion bus for the microcomputer industry. computers, consisting of p ...

machines, and later for their own S-100 bus computers running either the CP/M operating system or North Star's own proprietary operating system, NSDOS. North Star BASIC was a common dialect of the popular BASIC programming language. They later expanded their lineup with dual-CPU machines able to run

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

, and a server version running either DOS or

Novell NetWare NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the IPX network protocol. The original NetWare product in ...

. While initially successful, North Star's sales suffered from the company's adherence to hard sector

floppy drive A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...

s which made software difficult to port onto North Star machines. It was no longer a significant factor in the industry by the time less-expensive CP/M computers with built-in displays (and soft-sectored drives), such as the Osborne and the

Kaypro Kaypro Corporation was an American home and personal computer manufacturer based out of San Diego in the 1980s. The company was founded by Non-Linear Systems (NLS) to compete with the popular Osborne 1 portable microcomputer. Kaypro produced a ...

, were released. Sales slowed during the growth of the PC market.

History

The company was formed by Mark Greenberg and Charles Grant, who started Kentucky Fried Computer to handle retail and mail order sales of

computers in Berkeley in June 1976. According to one source, a lawsuit from Kentucky Fried Chicken led to the name change."NorthStar Horizon"
oldcomputers.net

FPB

North Star's first product was the Floating Point Board, an S-100 bus card that implemented a floating point coprocessor for

8080 The Intel 8080 (''"eighty-eighty"'') is the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. It first appeared in April 1974 and is an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibil ...

-based machines. The company later added

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

boards and Z80A processor cards to their lineup."North Star Computers"
catalog, August 1979

Micro-Disk System (1976)

North Star's next product was a hard sectored floppy disk system based on a 5-inch

Shugart Associates Shugart Associates (later Shugart Corporation) was a computer peripheral manufacturer that dominated the floppy disk drive market in the late 1970s and is famous for introducing the -inch "Minifloppy" floppy disk drive. In 1979 it was one of the f ...

SA-400 mechanism with 89 kB capacity. This was coupled with a S-100 bus controller and

ROM Rom, or ROM may refer to: Biomechanics and medicine * Risk of mortality, a medical classification to estimate the likelihood of death for a patient * Rupture of membranes, a term used during pregnancy to describe a rupture of the amniotic sac * ...

that included bootstrap code and shipped with North Star DOS and North Star BASIC. The MDS system cost US$699 and could be plugged into any S-100 bus machine, and was one of the earliest disk systems affordable for the average hobbyist. With the North Star installed, startup went from a lengthy process of manually entering a "loader" program through front-panel switches, to simply setting the run address to E800 on the address switches and flicking the RUN switch. North Star later updated the disk drive to support double-density disks with 180 kB, and later still double-sided, double-density disks with 360 kB of storage. However, the double-density product was pre-announced and sales of the original single-density, single-sided model ended overnight. The sudden loss of income almost bankrupted the company, and is used as an example of the

Osborne effect The Osborne effect is a social phenomenon of customers canceling or deferring orders for the current, soon-to-be-obsolete product as an unexpected drawback of a company's announcing a future product prematurely. It is an example of cannibalizati ...

in action.

North Star Horizon (1977)

North Star Horizon with terminal and floppy disks - restored

The Horizon was an 8-bit Zilog Z80A-based computer, typically with to of

. It had one or two single-sided single or double density hard sectored floppy disk drives (externally expandable to 3 or 4), and serial interfaces connected it to a

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 ...

and a printer. It ran CP/M or North Star's own proprietary

NSDOS The North Star Horizon was a popular 8-bit S-100 bus computer introduced in October 1977. Like most S-100 machines of the era, it was built around the Zilog Z80A microprocessor, and typically ran the CP/M operating system. It was produced by Nor ...

. It also included many chips on the motherboard that would otherwise require separate S-100 cards in other systems, thereby allowing the machine to operate "out of the box" with minimal setup. Announced in November 1977, the Horizon was one of the earliest systems to include built-in drives. The cabinet held up to 12 additional S-100 cards, with at least some of these used for memory cards. With one floppy drive the kit cost , while an assembled system cost . With two drives the kit cost , while an assembled system cost . Early machines used a wooden cabinet and sported a logo placard with the company name stylized "NorthStar". Later machines used an all-metal case and the name was separated (as in the image on this page).

North Star Advantage (1982)

The Advantage was a 4 MHz Z80A-based computer with 64 KB of user

and 16 KB of graphics RAM. It used two single-sided, double-density 180 kB floppy disk (hard-sectored) drives and an optional 5 MB

Winchester disk IBM manufactured magnetic disk storage devices from 1956 to 2003, when it sold its hard disk drive business to Hitachi. Both the hard disk drive (HDD) and floppy disk drive (FDD) were invented by IBM and as such IBM's employees were responsible fo ...

. The Advantage was known for its 640×240 graphics capabilities and was sold with four demonstration programs, one of which plotted and calculated a pattern of lines reminiscent of the Arcade game '' Qix''. The Advantage also had an optional

8088 The Intel 8088 ("''eighty-eighty-eight''", also called iAPX 88) microprocessor is a variant of the Intel 8086. Introduced on June 1, 1979, the 8088 has an eight-bit external data bus instead of the 16-bit bus of the 8086. The 16-bit registers a ...

co-processor A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor (the CPU). Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating-point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, cryptography ...

board available that ran

1.0. When the Advantage was introduced NorthStar had moved its offices, manufacturing and warehousing facilities to 14440 Catalina St. in San Leandro, California. NorthStar remained at that location until they ceased operations.

North Star Dimension (1984)

North Star in 1982 reached revenues of and had after-tax profit of . However, the growing success of the IBM PC diminished demand for North Star's CP/M-based offerings, and the company reported losses in 1983. To turn around fortunes, it introduced the Dimension—a

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...

computer, and North Star's first fully

PC-compatible IBM PC compatible computers are similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, all from computer giant IBM, that are able to use the same software and expansion cards. Such computers were referred to as PC clones, IBM clones or IBM PC clones. ...

product. Based on the 80186 chip at the server, the Dimension employed multiple screens each connected to a PC-compatible

8086 The 8086 (also called iAPX 86) is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between early 1976 and June 8, 1978, when it was released. The Intel 8088, released July 1, 1979, is a slightly modified chip with an external 8-bit data bus (allowi ...

-based slot card that mounted in the server. The screens and keyboards then connected to the

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...

cards in the server. The unit shipped with MS-DOS and

was available as an option; the Dimension was one of the first computers ever to offer NetWare as a software pack-in. The Dimension brought North Star out of its sales slump, and profits doubled into the second quarter of 1984.

After 1984

After giving North Star $3.7 million in debt financing, Fortune Systems Corporation, a

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

workstation manufacturer based in

Redwood City, California Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in Northern California's Bay Area, approximately south of San Francisco, and northwest of San Jose. Redwood City's history spans its earliest inhabitation by the Ohlone people to being a ...

, was in talks to acquire North Star for $14 million in August 1984. The deal fell through in October 1984, however, with North Star and Fortune agreeing to collaborate on forthcoming hardware projects nonetheless. Among North Star's last products was an upgrade to the Dimension—the Dimension 300—in 1987, and the EL family of multi-user system ISA

expansion card In computing, an expansion card (also called an expansion board, adapter card, peripheral card or accessory card) is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an electrical connector, or expansion slot (also referred to as a bus sl ...

s for the PC, based on the

Intel 8088 The Intel 8088 ("''eighty-eighty-eight''", also called iAPX 88) microprocessor is a variant of the Intel 8086. Introduced on June 1, 1979, the 8088 has an eight-bit external data bus instead of the 16-bit bus of the 8086. The 16-bit registers and ...

, 286 and

386 __NOTOC__ Year 386 ( CCCLXXXVI) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Honorius and Euodius (or, less frequently, year 11 ...

, in 1988. The company dissolved in 1989.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Bowkera.com: Alan Bowker's North Star computers
fro
Rich's Classic Computing Pagesclassic.technology: North Star Computers Inc. Catalog May 1980
1976 establishments in California 1989 disestablishments in California American companies established in 1976 American companies disestablished in 1989 Companies based in Berkeley, California Computer companies established in 1976 Computer companies disestablished in 1989 Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Defunct computer companies of the United States Early microcomputers S-100 machines Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area