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Formerly | Martin Research Ltd. (1974–1980) |
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Founded | 1974Northbrook, Illinois | in
Founder | Donald Paul Martin |
Defunct | 1986 |
Fate | Acquired by Zebra Technologies |
Products |
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Number of employees | 130 (1984) |
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. [1]
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Donald Paul Martin (1940 – August 27, 2019) founded Martin Research in Northbrook, Illinois, in around late 1974. Before starting his company, Martin graduated with a degree electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [2] Martin was also a co-founder of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange (CACHE), a Chicago-based computer club, established around the same time of Martin Research's incorporation. Early in the company's existence, Martin had aspirations of having a wide swath of industrial buyers who needed programmable controllers in factory environments. [3] Instead, Martin Research's products became popular among hobbyists, who used their microcomputers as trainer platforms. [1] The company soon embraced this demographic, designing products for buyers desperate to get their hands on a microcomputer in the burgeoning market. [4]
The company's first two products was a microcomputer, the Mike 1, and a book, Microcomputer Design (1975). The Mike 1 was a modular microcomputer running an Intel 8008 microprocessor. The book meanwhile catered to hobbyists wanting to design their own microcomputers based on the Intel 8008 and 8080 microprocessors. [5] Book reviewers recommended Microcomputer Design for readers who had familiarity with digital circuit design and transistor–transistor logic. [6] For an additional US$25 on the price of the $75 book, Martin shipped it with an 8008 chip. [5] John Gilchrist praised Microcomputer Design in a review in the third issue of Byte magazine: "The book is an excellent reference for the hardware microcomputer designer ... It is obvious the author has designed, debugged and used everything about which he writes. Whew! After reading this book he has my utmost professional respect." [7]
The Mike family of microcomputers were sold as kits or as fully-assembled units and were designed around a stack of circuit boards, each measuring 5.5 by 7 inches (14 by 18 cm), separated by spacers. [8] Each board carries a common bus through which each board can intercommunicate; [9] the boards are connected via a common ribbon cable. [10] Such a physical configuration was common among the more advanced minicomputers of its day. [9] The systems allowed any order of circuit boards on the bus, although the most common order was the Console Board first, the CPU Board second, the PROM/RAM Board third, and any order of circuit boards thereafter. [11] The Console Board sports a six-digit, seven-segment LED display and a twenty-key calculator-esque keypad. [12] Users enter instructions into the computer in octal form using the keypads, with the display updating in real-time to show the input as it is being typed. Users can address and manipulate any location in memory and show the contents therein on the display. [13]
The 8008-based Mike 1 was short-lived before being replaced by the Mike 2, a redesign of its predecessor also featuring an 8008 processor, at the end of the first quarter of 1975. [5] The Mike 2 was built around the 2-20 Console Board; the 2-1 CPU Board, which aside from the 8008 chip also contained a crystal oscillator and timing-control circuits; and the 2-3 PROM/RAM board, holding 1 KB of RAM and 2 KB of PROM. [9] The Mike 3 was released in the second quarter of 1975. [5] It swapped out the Intel 8008 microprocessor for its successor the 8080 and bumped the maximum amount of RAM to 4 KB. [1] Besides these two changes, the bus remained the same, and users could replace the CPU Board of the Mike 2 with that of the Mike 3 if they so desired. [14] The Mike 2 continued to be sold alongside the Mike 3 after the release of the latter. [15] Both systems proved quite popular in 1975, with Kilobaud Microcomputing editor John Craig writing in the magazine's charter issue that the computers were only second in popularity to the Altair 8800. [3]
In early 1977, the company released the three-board Mike 8, based on the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. [4] The Mike 8 features 4 KB of RAM and a 1-KB memory monitor program in ROM. [16] Said memory monitor program also provides RAM testing, single-stepping, and interrupt-setting functionalities. [17] The Mike 8 shipped with a blank Intel 2708 EPROM, onto which programs can be burned using the programmer located on the PROM/RAM Board. An ultra-violet light also came shipped with the Mike 8 for easy erasure and reuse of the included blank EPROM. [16] The Mike 8 was the first in the Mike family to be offered with an optional enclosure, so called the "black-box", to facilitate industrial applications and advanced hobbyist use of the computer. [17]
Around the turn of the 1980s, the company pivoted toward the business, industrial, and medical markets. [18] In the process it discontinued its kit computers, changed its name to Qwint Research, and moved its headquarters down the road from its original Commercial Avenue location in Northbrook. [19] Instead of leaning into the rapidly developing personal computer market, however, Qwint decided to sell teletypes and printing terminals. [18] In 1977, Martin Research's vice president of marketing Kerry Berland had professed that the "ultimate market" for personal computers would "be a packaged, high-volume, low-cost consumer product", and that while his company would "like some of that market ... we have serious doubts that anyone who doesn't control the semiconductor process will make it there." [20] In Datamation , Philip H. Dorn attributed the fall of Martin Research's kit computer operations to the IBM Personal Computer becoming a commodity after its release in 1981, leading to the maturation of the microcomputer market where many pioneering companies, with their hobbyist-centric products, had difficulty competing. [21]
Qwint sold its first trio of products under the new brand in April 1981, with the KSR-743 transmit-and-receive printing terminal, the KSR-744 teletype, and the receive-only RO-743. [22] In 1982, the company expanded the KSR-744 teletype with two successor models, both supporting word processor-esque editing features by expanding its RAM. The more expensive of the two added support for accessing early email providers. [23] The following year, the company introduced the 780 series of teleprinters, which supported graphics. [24] The new business proved lucrative enough for Qwint to employ 130 in 1984; the same year, the company moved into a 46,907-square-foot facility in Lincolnshire, Illinois. [18] Zebra Technologies acquired Qwint in 1986. [25]
The Intel 8080 ("eighty-eighty") is the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. It first appeared in April 1974 and is an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibility. The initial specified clock rate or frequency limit was 2 MHz, with common instructions using 4, 5, 7, 10, or 11 cycles. As a result, the processor is able to execute several hundred thousand instructions per second. Two faster variants, the 8080A-1 and 8080A-2, became available later with clock frequency limits of 3.125 MHz and 2.63 MHz respectively. The 8080 needs two support chips to function in most applications: the i8224 clock generator/driver and the i8228 bus controller. It is implemented in N-type metal–oxide–semiconductor logic (NMOS) using non-saturated enhancement mode transistors as loads thus demanding a +12 V and a −5 V voltage in addition to the main transistor–transistor logic (TTL) compatible +5 V.
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.
In computer architecture, 8-bit integers or other data units are those that are 8 bits wide. Also, 8-bit central processing unit (CPU) and arithmetic logic unit (ALU) architectures are those that are based on registers or data buses of that size. Memory addresses for 8-bit CPUs are generally larger than 8-bit, usually 16-bit. 8-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 8-bit microprocessors.
A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (PCB). Microcomputers became popular in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of increasingly powerful microprocessors. The predecessors to these computers, mainframes and minicomputers, were comparatively much larger and more expensive. Many microcomputers are also personal computers. An early use of the term "personal computer" in 1962 predates microprocessor-based designs. (See "Personal Computer: Computers at Companies" reference below). A "microcomputer" used as an embedded control system may have no human-readable input and output devices. "Personal computer" may be used generically or may denote an IBM PC compatible machine.
The Intel 8008 is an early 8-bit microprocessor capable of addressing 16 KB of memory, introduced in April 1972. The 8008 architecture was designed by Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC) and was implemented and manufactured by Intel. While the 8008 was originally designed for use in CTC's Datapoint 2200 programmable terminal, an agreement between CTC and Intel permitted Intel to market the chip to other customers after Seiko expressed an interest in using it for a calculator.
The Datapoint 2200 was a mass-produced programmable terminal usable as a computer, designed by Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC) founders Phil Ray and Gus Roche and announced by CTC in June 1970. It was initially presented by CTC as a versatile and cost-efficient terminal for connecting to a wide variety of mainframes by loading various terminal emulations from tape rather than being hardwired as most contemporary terminals, including their earlier Datapoint 3300. However, Dave Gust, a CTC salesman, realized that the 2200 could meet Pillsbury Foods's need for a small computer in the field, after which the 2200 was marketed as a stand-alone computer. Its industrial designer John "Jack" Frassanito has later claimed that Ray and Roche always intended the Datapoint 2200 to be a full-blown personal computer, but that they chose to keep quiet about this so as not to concern investors and others. Also significant is the fact that the terminal's multi-chip CPU (processor)'s instruction set became the basis of the Intel 8008 instruction set, which inspired the Intel 8080 instruction set and the x86 instruction set used in the processors for the original IBM PC and its descendants.
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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.
Realistic Controls Corporation (NCC), later Nylac Computer Corporation and Archives, Inc., was an American computer company based in Davenport, Iowa, founded in 1974.
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