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Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| Processor Technology Corporation | |
|---|---|
 | |
 6200 Hollis Street in Emeryville, California, site of Processor Technology Corporation's former headquarters | |
| Industry | Computer |
| Founded | April 1975 in Berkeley, California |
| Founder |
|
| Defunct | May 1979 |
| Fate | Dissolved |
Processor Technology Corporation was a personal computer company founded in April 1975, by Gary Ingram and Bob Marsh in Berkeley, California.[1] Their first product was a 4K byte RAM board that was compatible with the MITS Altair 8800 computer but more reliable than the MITS board.[2] This was followed by a series of memory and I/O boards including a video display module.[3]
Popular Electronics magazine wanted a feature article on an intelligent computer terminal and Technical Editor Les Solomon asked Marsh and Lee Felsenstein to design one. It was featured on the July 1976, cover and became the Sol-20 Personal Computer.[4] The first units were shipped in December 1976 and the Sol-20 was a very successful product.[5] The company failed to develop next generation products and ceased operations in May 1979.[6]
Bob Marsh, Lee Felsenstein and Gordon French started designing the Sol-20 between April and July 1975. The Sol-20 utilized the Intel 8080 8-bit microprocessor chip, running at 2 MHz. A major difference between the Sol-20 and most other machines of the era was its built-in video driver, which allowed it to be attached to a composite monitor for display. The Sol-20 consisted of a main motherboard (PCB) mounted at the bottom of the case, and a five slot S-100 bus card cage. The main PCB consisted of the CPU, memory, video display, I/O circuits. Inside the case included power supply, fan, and keyboard. The case was painted 'IBM blue' and the sides of the case were made of solid oiled walnut originally salvaged from a gun stock manufacturer.[7]
Processor Technology manufactured approximately 10,000 Sol-20 personal computers between 1977 and 1979. All Processor Technology products were available either fully assembled, or as electronic kits. Processor Technology also sold software on Compact Cassette. One side of the tape was recorded in CUTS format, and the other side was Kansas City standard format. Gary Ingram and Steven Dompier wrote the original software utilities. Lee Felsenstein wrote the original user manuals as a contractor.
Processor Technology also designed several S-100 bus boards. The boards were meant to be compatible with the circuits of Sol-20.
The Video Display Module 1 (VDM-1) was the original video display interface for S-100 bus systems.[8] The board generates sixteen 64-character lines of upper and lower case typeface on any standard composite video monitor or a modified TV set. Utilizing a 1,024 byte (1K) segment of system memory, the VDM-1 provided memory-mapped I/O for high performance, and also included hardware support for scrolling. The VDM-1 Video Board was a great improvement over using a teletype machine or a serial attached terminal, and was popular for owners of other S-100 bus systems such as the IMSAI 8080.
Another popular product was the CUTS Tape I/O Interface S-100 board. The CUTS board offered standard interface for saving and reading data from cassette tape, supporting both the Kansas City standard format, as well as their own custom CUTS format. Lee Felsenstein was key participant of the development of Kansas City standard format, the first cross-system data transfer standard for microcomputers.
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Processor Technology Corporation was a personal computer company founded in April 1975, by Gary Ingram and Bob Marsh in Berkeley, California. Their first product was a 4K byte RAM board that was compatible with the MITS Altair 8800 computer but more reliable than the MITS board. This was followed by a series of memory and I/O boards including a video display module. Popular Electronics magazine wanted a feature article on an intelligent computer terminal and Technical Editor Les Solomon asked Marsh and Lee Felsenstein to design one. It was featured on the July 1976, cover and became the Sol-20 Personal Computer. The first units were shipped in December 1976 and the Sol-20 was a very successful product. The company failed to develop next generation products and ceased operations in May 1979.
Lee Felsenstein (born April 27, 1945) is an American computer engineer who played a central role in the development of personal computers. He was one of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club and the designer of the Osborne 1, the first mass-produced portable computer. Before the Osborne, Felsenstein designed the Intel 8080 based Sol-20 computer from Processor Technology, the PennyWhistle modem, and other early "S-100 bus" era designs. His shared-memory alphanumeric video display design, the Processor Technology VDM-1 video display module board, was widely copied and became the basis for the standard display architecture of personal computers. Many of his designs were leaders in reducing costs of computer technologies for the purpose of making them available to large markets. His work featured a concern for the social impact of technology and was influenced by the philosophy of Ivan Illich. Felsenstein was the engineer for the Community Memory project, one of the earliest attempts to place networked computer terminals in public places to facilitate social interactions among individuals, in the era before the commercial Internet.
The Sol-20 was among the first fully assembled microcomputers with a built-in keyboard and television output, what would later be known as a home computer. The design was the integration of an Intel 8080-based motherboard, a VDM-1 graphics card, the 3P+S I/O card to interface with the keyboard, and the CUTS card (Cassette Users Tape System) circuitry to connect to a cassette deck for program storage. Additional expansion was available via five S-100 bus slots inside the machine. It also included swappable ROMs that the manufacturer called 'personality modules', containing a rudimentary operating system. The design was originally suggested by Les Solomon, the editor of Popular Electronics. He asked Bob Marsh of Processor Technology if he could design a smart terminal for use with the Altair 8800. Lee Felsenstein, who shared a garage working space with Marsh, had previously designed such a terminal but never built it. Reconsidering the design using modern electronics, they agreed the best solution was to build a complete computer with a terminal program in ROM. Felsenstein has stated that the name of the Sol was inspired after Les Solomon, Technical Editor of Popular Electronics. The Sol appeared on the cover of the July 1976 issue of Popular Electronics as a "high-quality intelligent terminal". It was initially offered in three versions; the Sol-PC motherboard in kit form, the Sol-10 without expansion slots, and the Sol-20 with five slots. A Sol-20 was taken to the Personal Computing Show in Atlantic City in August 1976 where it was a hit, building an order backlog that took a year to fill. Systems began shipping late that year and were dominated by the expandable Sol-20, which sold for $1,495 in its most basic fully-assembled form. The company also offered schematics for the system for free for those interested in building their own. The Sol-20 remained in production until 1979, by which point about 12,000 machines had been sold. By that time, the "1977 trinity" —the Apple II, Commodore PET and TRS-80— had begun to take over the market, and a series of failed new product introductions drove Processor Technology into bankruptcy. Felsenstein later developed the successful Osborne 1 computer, using much the same underlying design in a portable format.
Codasip (abrev. CO-Design Application-Specific Instruction-set Processor) is a processor technology company enabling system-on-chip developers to differentiate their products. The company specializes in RISC-V processor technologies and offers Codasip Studio, a tool suite for processor design using the CodAL architecture description language. The company's headquarters are in Munich, Germany. Codasip has claimed that there are more than 2 billion processor cores that have been produced using their technology.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Joe Louis.