Alpha Microsystems, Inc., often shortened to Alpha Micro, was an American computer company founded in 1977 in

Costa Mesa, California Costa Mesa (; Spanish language, Spanish for "coastal tableland") is a city in Orange County, California, United States. Since its incorporation in 1953, the city has grown from a semi-rural farming community of 16,840 to an urban area including ...

, by John French, Dick Wilcox and Bob Hitchcock. During the

dot-com boom The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Intern ...

, 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.

Products

The first Alpha Micro computer was the S-100 AM-100, based upon the WD16 microprocessor chipset from

Western Digital Western Digital Corporation is an American data storage company headquartered in San Jose, California. Established in 1970, the company is one of the world's largest manufacturers of hard disk drives (HDDs). History 1970s Western Digital ...

. In April 1978, the two-board AM-100 was offered at $1,495 (). As of 1982, AM-100/L and the AM-1000 were based on the

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 and had been named Motorola since 1947. Many of Motorola's products had been ...

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 Sector ...

and succeeding processors, though Alpha Micro swapped several addressing lines to create byte-ordering compatibility with their earlier processor. Early

peripheral A peripheral device, or simply peripheral, is an auxiliary hardware device that a computer uses to transfer information externally. A peripheral is a hardware component that is accessible to and controlled by a computer but is not a core compo ...

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. Most early computers only had a front panel to input or display ...

s (such models as Soroc, Hazeltine 1500, and Wyse WY50), Fortran punch card readers, 300

baud rate In a digitally modulated signal or a line code, symbol rate, modulation rate or baud is the number of symbol changes, waveform changes, or signaling events across the transmission medium per unit of time. The symbol rate is measured in ''baud'' ...

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 so ...

modems (later upgraded to 1,200 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 (HHS), and is headquartered in Atlanta, ...

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 hard disk drive platter, pla ...

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 An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

called AMOS ( Alpha Micro Operating System). The operating system on the 68000 machines was called AMOS/L. The operating system had major similarities to the operating system of the DEC

DECsystem-10 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...

. 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 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...

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 corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Comput ...

's Mac 68k emulator 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 (though several other languages, including Assembler, FORTRAN, Pascal, and COBOL, were available). Older versions interpreted a tokenized executable file. Later versions translate the tokenized executable into x86 code for performance. Other programming languages included AlphaFortran, AlphaLisp and AlphaPascal. In the past, Alpha Micro bundled their operating system and tools such as BASIC and their

ISAM Indexed Sequential Access Method (ISAM) 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 maintained to achieve ...

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

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, DEC, HP and

IBM mainframe IBM mainframes are large computer systems produced by IBM since 1952. During the 1960s and 1970s, IBM dominated the computer market with the 7000 series and the later System/360, followed by the System/370. Current mainframe computers in IBM' ...

s to interface with the

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

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 originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

. The Alpha Micro computer never achieved mainstream name recognition, though it was 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.

References

{{Reflist

External links

* A
emulator
for the WD16 based system is available.
The Alpha Micro Phun Machine
running on an AMOS-based Eagle 300 system.
Alpha Micro 1000 page on www.old-computers.com
1977 establishments in California 2018 establishments in California American companies established in 1977 American companies established in 2018 Computer companies established in 1977 Computer companies disestablished in 2018 Defunct computer companies based in California Defunct computer companies of the United States S-100 machines Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct computer systems companies Minicomputers