 | |
 SWTPC 6800 Microcomputer System | |
| SWTPC | |
| Predecessor | Daniel E. Meyer Company |
| Founded | 1967 |
| Defunct | 1990 |
| Successor | Point Systems |
| Headquarters | San Antonio, Texas |
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.
In the 1960s, many hobbyist electronics magazines such as Popular Electronics and Radio-Electronics published construction articles, for many of which the author would arrange for a company to provide a kit of parts to build the project. Daniel Meyer published several popular projects and successfully sold parts kits. He soon started selling kits for other authors such as Don Lancaster and Louis Garner. Between 1967 and 1971, SWTPC sold kits for over 50 Popular Electronics articles. Most of these kits were intended for audio use, such as hi-fi, utility amplifiers, and test equipment such as a function generator based on the Intersil ICL8038.
Many of these early kits used analog electronics technology, since digital technology was not yet affordable for most hobbyists. Some of the kits took advantage of new integrated circuits to allow low-cost construction of projects. For example, the new Signetics NE565 phase-locked loop chip was the core of a subsidiary communications authority (SCA) decoder board, which could be built and added to an FM radio to demodulate special programming (often, background music) not previously available to the general public. FCC regulations did not ban reception or decoding of radio transmissions, but SCA demodulation had previously required complex and expensive circuitry. Another popular new integrated circuit was the Signetics NE555, a versatile and low-cost timing oscillator chip, which was used in signal generators and simple timers. In 1972, SWTPC had a large enough collection of kits to justify printing a 32-page catalog.
In January 1975, SWTPC introduced a computer terminal kit, the "TV Typewriter", or CT-1024. By November 1975, they were delivering complete computer kits based on Motorola MPUs. They were very successful for the next 5 or so years and grew to over 100 employees.
As the new market evolved rapidly, most of the companies that were selling a computer kit in 1975 were out of business by 1978. Around 1987, SWTPC moved to selling point of sale computer systems, eventually changing its name to Point Systems. This new company lasted only a few years.
When microprocessors (CPU chips) became available, SWTPC became one of the first suppliers of microcomputers to the general public, focusing on designs using the Motorola 6800 and, later, the 6809 CPUs. The first such microcomputer introduced by the company, in November 1975, was the SWTPC 6800, which is also the progenitor of the widely used SS-50 bus.
Many of SWTPC's products, including the 6800 microcomputer, were available in kit form. SWTPC also designed and supplied computer terminals, chassis, processor cards, memory cards, motherboards, I/O cards, disk drive systems, and tape storage systems. From the older "TV Typewriter" design a video terminal had evolved the CT-64 terminal system, which was an essential part of many early SWTPC systems. Later a more intelligent version of this terminal, the CT-82, was introduced, and a graphical terminal the GT-6144 Graphics Terminal. Still later a SS-50 bus plug-in board, the "Data Systems 68 6845 Video Display Board" was introduced, and a keyboard could be connected to this board. With this solution an external terminal was no longer needed.
SWTPC's SS-50 backplane bus was also supported or used by other manufacturers: (Midwest Scientific, Smoke Signal Broadcasting, Gimix, Helix, Tano, Percom Data, Safetran), etc. It was extended to the SS-64 (for the 68000 CPU) by Helix. SWTPC also designed one of the first affordable printers available for microcomputer users; it was based on a receipt printer mechanism.
Technical Systems Consultants, first of West Lafayette, Indiana (ex Purdue University) and later of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was the foremost supplier of software for SWTPC compatible hardware. Their software included operating systems (Flex, mini-FLEX, FLEX09, and UniFLEX) and various languages (several BASIC variants, FORTRAN, Pascal, C, assemblers, etc.) and other applications. Other software, from third parties, included Introl's C compiler, Omegasoft's Pascal compiler, the Lucidata Pascal system (from Cambridge, UK), and assorted spread sheets and text processors. By about 1980, TSC had developed a Unix-like multi-user, multi-programming operating system (UniFlex), for 6809 systems with DMA 8" floppy disks and extended memory. Several of TSC's languages were ported to the UniFlex, as was the Lucidata Pascal system.
SWTPC's software catalog included the TSC software, and software from many other sources (including SWTPC itself). Much of it was also available in source code, at a higher price.
Inspired by People's Computer Company's call for Tiny BASICs, Robert Uiterwyk wrote the MICRO BASIC 1.3 interpreter for the SWTPC 6800, which SWTPC published in the June 1976 issue of the SWTPC newsletter. Uiterwyk had handwritten the language on a legal tablet. He later expanded the language to 4K, adding support for floating-point arithmetic; this implementation was unique among BASIC interpreters by using Binary Coded Decimal to nine digits of precision, with a range up to 1099. An 8K version added string variables and trigonometry functions. Both the 4K and 8K versions were sold by SWTPC. In January 1978, Uiterwyk sold the rights of the source code to Motorola. [1] [2]
The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by a small team led by Chuck Peddle for MOS Technology. The design team had formerly worked at Motorola on the Motorola 6800 project; the 6502 is essentially a simplified, less expensive and faster version of that design.
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.
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.
Tiny BASIC is a family of dialects of the BASIC programming language that can fit into 4 or fewer KBs of memory. Tiny BASIC was designed in response to the open letter published by Bill Gates complaining about users pirating Altair BASIC, which sold for $150. Tiny BASIC was intended to be a completely free version of BASIC that would run on the same early microcomputers.
The KIM-1, short for Keyboard Input Monitor, is a small 6502-based single-board computer developed and produced by MOS Technology, Inc. and launched in 1976. It was very successful in that period, due to its low price and easy-access expandability.
The Kansas City standard (KCS), or Byte standard, is a data storage protocol for standard cassette tapes at 300 bits per second. It originated in a symposium sponsored by Byte magazine in November 1975 in Kansas City, Missouri to develop a standard for the storage of digital microcomputer data on inexpensive consumer quality cassettes. The first systems based on the standard appeared in 1976.
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.
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.
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 TV Typewriter is a video terminal that could display two pages of 16 lines of 32 upper case characters on a standard television set. The design, by Don Lancaster, appeared on the cover of Radio-Electronics magazine in September 1973.
A microprocessor development board is a printed circuit board containing a microprocessor and the minimal support logic needed for an electronic engineer or any person who wants to become acquainted with the microprocessor on the board and to learn to program it. It also served users of the microprocessor as a method to prototype applications in products.
The Intersil 6100 is a single-chip microprocessor implementation of the 12-bit PDP-8 instruction set, along with a range of peripheral support and memory ICs developed by Intersil in the mid-1970s. It was sometimes referred to as the CMOS-PDP8. Since it was also produced by Harris Corporation, it was also known as the Harris HM-6100. The Intersil 6100 was introduced in the second quarter of 1975, and the Harris version in 1976.
The Aamber Pegasus is a home computer first produced in New Zealand in 1981 by Technosys Research Labs.
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.
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.
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.
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. It proved successful among various businesses and universities and allowed the company to survive into at least the early 1990s.