Gimix

Last updated

Gimix, Inc.
Company typePrivate
Industry
  • Electronics
  • Computers
Founded1975;49 years ago (1975) in Chicago, Illinois
FounderRobert C. Philips

Gimix, Inc., was an American electronics and computer company based in Chicago, Illinois, founded by Robert C. Philips. Established in 1975, the company was initially Philips's vehicle for selling his various remote-controlled devices he had developed as the result of a life-long interest in electronics and experiments with home automation for himself and other clients. In 1979, the company introduced the first in a series of 68xx-based microcomputers dubbed the Ghost. [1] It proved successful among various businesses and universities and allowed the company to survive into at least the early 1990s.

Contents

History

Gimix was founded in Chicago, Illinois, by Robert C. Philips in late 1975. Philips, a life-long electronics enthusiast and high school dropout, [2] had in the early 1970s achieved total automation of his apartment using computerized relay circuits that he designed at the age of 25. This project attracted the attention of famous Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, who commissioned him to design the electronics for an automated home based on Tigerman's specifications. Philips' home automation system for Tigerman worked through radio frequency signals sent wirelessly and through the power line of the house, in a scheme similar to the now-standard X10 protocol. [3]

Philips soon after incorporated Gimix as a name for his home automation business and as a vehicle for branding his remote-controlled devices. [4] Sometime between its founding and 1978, he hired Richard Don as vice president. In 1978, the company introduced a trio of devices for telephones: the Gimix Hold, which allows a home receiver to put a caller on hold with a custom message; the Gimix Gobbler, which allows a home receiver to distinguish between multiple incoming calls; and the Gimix Auto-Page, which links a phone alarm or answering machine to a paging terminal. [5]

Gimix occupied a 5,000-sq-ft building on W. 37th Place in Chicago. [6] In 1979, the company introduced its first microcomputer that was in essence a clone of Southwest Technical Products Corporation (SWTPC)'s 6800 microcomputer. Named the System 68, Gimix's computer featured an SS-50-bus motherboard (like the SWTPC), with fifteen 50-pin slots and eight 30-pin slots, both gold-plated. Its CPU board featured a Motorola 6800 microprocessor and four Intel 2708 EPROMs, while the system came outfitted with a 16 KB memory board as stock. A number of DIP switches on the boards allowed the system to be configured compatible with software for SWTPC and Midwest Scientific Instruments' computers. A video board allowed for composite output straight from the computer. [7]

The System 68 (also known as the Gimix Ghost [1] ) was designed for process control applications, in the home and in industrial automation. [8] The base System 68 and its successors soon found customers as disparate as NASA, Ford Motor Company, DuPont, the Atomic Energy Commission, General Motors, Georgia Tech, and more. [9] Gimix also had a model of microcomputer dedicated entirely to home automation, which in 1980 sold for $10,000 and over (depending on the configuration) and allowed appliances to be operated and monitored for energy consumption and usage patterns and log "important household information". [10] Company president Bob Phillips acknowledged at the time that their computers were too expensive for most homes, and were like a "Hollywood-type toy". [10] In around 1982, the company introduced the Gimix 6809, a conventional computer based on the Motorola 6809, running both OS-9, a UNIX-like operating system, and FLEX, a popular single-user DOS for Motorola-based computers. [11] In 1986, they developed single-board computers and development systems based on the Motorola 68020. [12]

Gimix was still operational in 1991, employing 15 people at their W. 37th Place facility in Chicago. [6]

Legacy

The Gimix 6809 was the development system of choice for Eugene Jarvis, a game designer who programmed the popular arcade games Robotron: 2084 and Defender on the system. [13]

Citations

  1. 1 2 Price 1979, p. 110.
  2. ↑ Phillips 1977, p. B-7.
  3. ↑ Gupton 1980, pp. 137–139.
  4. ↑ Phillips 1977, p. B-7; Mandell 1979, p. 45.
  5. ↑ Wood 1978, p. 26.
  6. 1 2 Harris Publishing Company 1991, p. 188.
  7. ↑ Staff writer 1979, p. 249.
  8. ↑ Gupton 1980, pp. 144–145.
  9. ↑ Nay 1984.
  10. 1 2 Staff writer 1980, p. C5.
  11. ↑ Benson 1982, p. 152.
  12. ↑ Staff writer 1986, p. 94.
  13. ↑ Campbell 2014; Rothe 2010.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Motorola 6800</span> 8-bit microprocessor

The 6800 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed and first manufactured by Motorola in 1974. The MC6800 microprocessor was part of the M6800 Microcomputer System that also included serial and parallel interface ICs, RAM, ROM and other support chips. A significant design feature was that the M6800 family of ICs required only a single five-volt power supply at a time when most other microprocessors required three voltages. The M6800 Microcomputer System was announced in March 1974 and was in full production by the end of that year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Motorola 6809</span> 8-bit microprocessor

The Motorola 6809 ("sixty-eight-oh-nine") is an 8-bit microprocessor with some 16-bit features. It was designed by Motorola's Terry Ritter and Joel Boney and introduced in 1978. Although source compatible with the earlier Motorola 6800, the 6809 offered significant improvements over it and 8-bit contemporaries like the MOS Technology 6502, including a hardware multiplication instruction, 16-bit arithmetic, system and user stack registers allowing re-entrant code, improved interrupts, position-independent code and an orthogonal instruction set architecture with a comprehensive set of addressing modes.

OS-9 is a family of real-time, process-based, multitasking, multi-user operating systems, developed in the 1980s, originally by Microware Systems Corporation for the Motorola 6809 microprocessor. It was purchased by Radisys Corp in 2001, and was purchased again in 2013 by its current owner Microware LP.

Microware Systems Corporation was an American software company based in Clive, Iowa, that produced the OS-9 real-time operating system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SWTPC</span> Defunct US electronic kit and computer producer

Southwest Technical Products Corporation, or SWTPC, was an American producer of electronic kits, and later complete computer systems. It was incorporated in 1967 in San Antonio, Texas, succeeding the Daniel E. Meyer Company. In 1990, SWTPC became Point Systems, before ceasing a few years later.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VEB Robotron</span> East German manufacturer of computers and consumer electronics

VEB Kombinat Robotron was the largest East German electronics manufacturer. It was headquartered in Dresden and employed 68,000 people in 1989. Its products included personal computers, SM EVM minicomputers, the ESER mainframe computers, various computer peripherals as well as microcomputers, radios, television sets and other items including cookie press Kleingebäckpresse Typ 102.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FLEX (operating system)</span> Single-tasking operating system for the Motorola 6800

FLEX is a discontinued single-tasking operating system developed by Technical Systems Consultants (TSC) of West Lafayette, Indiana, for the Motorola 6800 in 1976.

UniFLEX is a Unix-like operating system developed by Technical Systems Consultants (TSC) for the Motorola 6809 family which allowed multitasking and multiprocessing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Meyer (engineer)</span>

Daniel Meyer was the founder and president Southwest Technical Products Corporation. He was born in New Braunfels, Texas, and raised in San Marcos, Texas, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics in 1957 from Southwest Texas State. After college he married Helen Wentz, moved to San Antonio and became a research engineer in the electrical engineering department of Southwest Research Institute.

Ohio Scientific, Inc., was a privately owned American computer company based in Ohio that built and marketed computer systems, expansions, and software from 1975 to 1986. Their best-known products were the Challenger series of microcomputers and Superboard single-board computers. The company was the first to market microcomputers with hard disk drives in 1977.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SS-50 bus</span>

The SS-50 bus was an early computer bus designed as a part of the SWTPC 6800 Computer System that used the Motorola 6800 CPU. The SS-50 motherboard would have around seven 50-pin connectors for CPU and memory boards plus eight 30-pin connectors for I/O boards. The I/O section was sometimes called the SS-30 bus.

The MPT8080 "Microtutor" is a microprocessor trainer based on the Intel 8080 processor, developed by Limrose Electronics. It was designed in the mid-1970s to assist in the understanding of the then-new microprocessors.

Smoke Signal Broadcasting, Inc. (SSB), later known as Smoke Signal, was an American computer company founded in 1976 by Frederic Jerome "Ric" Hammond of Hollywood, California. The company earned its reputation by offering expansions for the Southwest Technical Products (SWTPC) 6800 microcomputer. It later manufactured its own line of computers, called the Chieftain. Though it remains little-known, Smoke Signal was an early and important manufacturer of multi-user computer systems.

Pacific Cyber/Metrix, Inc. was an American computer company based in California. The company was founded in 1975 in San Ramon, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SWTPC 6800</span>

The SWTPC 6800 Computer System, simply referred to as SWTPC 6800, is an early microcomputer developed by the Southwest Technical Products Corporation and introduced in 1975. Built around the Motorola 6800 microprocessor from which it gets its name, the SWTPC 6800 was one of the first microcomputers based around that microprocessor. It is the progenitor of the widely used and broadly supported SS-50 bus. The SWTPC 6800 became one of the most popular 6800-based systems of its time, owing to its ease of use and ample documentation. Though rudimentary, the MIKBUG resident monitor built into ROM allows the immediate entry of program data after power-up, as opposed to other microcomputers of its day which required bootstrapping such software. Southwest Technical Products introduced the SWTPC 6800 in November 1975 for US$450 in kit form only. Any contemporary ASCII terminal can be used to interface with the SWTPC 6800. SWTPC sold their own television-set-based terminal, for $275; a crude dot-matrix printer was another optional accessory, for $250.

Parasitic Engineering, Inc., was an American computer company founded by Howard Fullmer and Gene Nardi in 1974. Named as a tongue-in-cheek reference to a comment by MITS co-founder Ed Roberts, Parasitic's first products were hardware upgrade kits to MITS' Altair 8800 microcomputer kit, improving the latter's power supply rating and susceptibility to noise. The company later released their own microcomputer based on the same bus as the Altair, the S-100, but it was less popular than the company's hardware-improvement kits. By 1979, the company had pivoted to providing upgrades to Tandy's TRS-80. Parasitic went defunct in 1983.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Midwest Scientific</span> American computer company

Midwest Scientific Instruments, Inc. (MSI), often shortened to Midwest Scientific, was an American computer company founded in Olathe, Kansas, in the early 1970s. Charles C. Childress, a doctorate of biochemistry, founded the company as a way to market his data acquisition and processing interfaces based on programmable calculators for medical, scientific, and industrial uses. After an after-market floppy drive system for the SWTPC 6800 proved a hot-seller for Midwest in 1976, the company began products for general-purpose computers like the SWTPC. In 1977, they released their own microcomputer, the MSI 6800—a clone of the SWTPC 6800. Their sales tripled that year and prompted expansion in the Kansas City area. It survived into the mid-1980s before going defunct and having its remaining assets auctioned off.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Research</span> American computer company (1974–1986)

Martin Research Ltd., later Qwint Systems, Inc., was an American computer company founded by Donald Paul Martin in Northbrook, Illinois, United States. The company released their Mike family of modular kit microcomputers starting in 1975. These computers, spanning several models based on the Intel 8008, 8080, and Zilog Z80 microprocessors, proved very popular among hobbyists who wanted an inexpensive trainer computer.

Zeda Computers International Limited, trading as Zeda Computer Systems, was an American computer company based in Provo, Utah, and with overseas office in Nottingham. Founded in 1974, their best-selling computer was the Zeda 580, a Zilog Z80-based all-in-one microcomputer.

The ACFA-8 was a microcomputer based on the Motorola 6808. It was released in 1979 by Andrew M. Veronis, a doctorate of computer science more well-known for his books on computer engineering.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.