North Star Horizon

Bruce Lane <kyrrin(a)bluefeathertech.com>om>, a voice of desperation in this data wilderness, cried: Close. The Horizon was definitely one of the better-built and more reliable S100 boxes of the time. 10 slots (I think), and a little unusual in that the serial and parallel I/O were built into the motherboard. Most had a wood case. (I once had to replicate all that stuff on a wirewrap board for a client who needed more than 10 card slots and had to migrate to a Cromemco Z2 chassis while maintaining I/O compatibility. I also discovered with that system that their hard disk - a 14" 20(?)meg Century drive - suffered from serious read/write problems due to ground loops. Annoying but solvable. I digress...) CP/M was available, but not the stock OS. North Star (originally Kentucky Fried Computers - swear to god) designed their own unique floppy controller (it was their entry into the S100 market) and had a proprietary OS to go with it. The controller was a full S100 board to run the 5" drives alone, and the weird and difficult thing was that they used HARD sectored floppies, 10 sectors per track (not to be confused with the 16 sector floppies used by Micropolis). Jonathan