NorthStar Horizon incoming

NorthStar (founded by 2 Berkeley professors) made one of the earliest S-100 5.25" disk sub-systems. IIRC, it sold for $699 which was cheaper than than the 8" systems available, and made it a popular add-on for IMSAI and other early S-100 machines. It always included NorthStar DOS and BASIC, but CP/M was eventually adapted for it (by Lifeboat Associates I think). The Horizon was a farily well-designed 4 MHz Z-80 S-100 box supplied with N*'s own 16K (and later 32K, 48K, and 64K) dynamic RAM cards. The floppy controller was designed to use 10 hole hard sectored diskettes (which are still available to DSQD (800K). They also made one of the earliest floating point processor boards (which I believe only their own BASIC supported, in precisions from 8 to 14 digits). They eventually added a range of HDs and continued with their own operating system development including a multi-user environment, though they also officially offered CP/M. I was one of the founding members (along with John Dvorak, who at one time published a Software Review and sold N* software out of his home!) of INSUA, the International NorthStar User's Association which published a very good newsletter for many years. NorthStar made the transistion past the introduction of the PC by offering an all-in-one SBC system with graphics (the Advantage) and even had a dual-processor (Z-80 / 8088) model. Despite attempting to expand their marketing by linking up with General Bindery Corporation (spiral-bound and other binding equipment) to sell NorthStars through business equipment suppliers, they eventually went the way of all S-100 manufacturers - R.I.P. Bob Stek bobstek(a)ix.netcom.com Saver of Lost SOLs