The company was formed by Mark Greenberg and Charles Grant, who started
Kentucky Fried Computer to handle retail and mail order sales of
IMSAI computers in Berkeley in June 1976. According to one source, a lawsuit from
Kentucky Fried Chicken led to the name change.
FPB North Star's first product was the
Floating Point Board, an S-100 bus card that implemented a
floating point coprocessor for
8080-based machines.
Micro-Disk System (1976) North Star's next product was a hard sectored floppy disk system based on a 5-inch
Shugart Associates SA-400 mechanism with 89 kB capacity. This was coupled with an S-100 bus controller and
ROM that included bootstrap code and shipped with North Star DOS and
North Star BASIC. The
MDS system cost
US$699 and could be plugged into any S-100 bus machine, and was one of the earliest disk systems affordable for the average hobbyist. With the North Star installed, startup went from a lengthy process of manually entering a "loader" program through front-panel switches, to simply setting the run address to E800 on the address switches and flicking the RUN switch. North Star later updated the disk drive to support double-density disks with 180 kB, and later still double-sided, double-density disks with 360 kB of storage. However, the double-density product was pre-announced and sales of the original single-density, single-sided model ended overnight. The sudden loss of income almost bankrupted the company, and is used as an example of the
Osborne effect in action.
North Star Horizon (1977) The Horizon was an 8-bit Zilog
Z80A-based computer, typically with to of
RAM. It had one or two single-sided single or double density hard sectored floppy disk drives (externally expandable to 3 or 4), and
serial interfaces connected it to a
computer terminal and a printer. It ran CP/M or North Star's own proprietary
NSDOS. It also included many chips on the
motherboard that would otherwise require separate S-100 cards in other systems, thereby allowing the machine to operate "out of the box" with minimal setup. Announced in November 1977, the Horizon was one of the earliest systems to include built-in drives. The cabinet held up to 12 additional S-100 cards, with at least some of these used for memory cards. With one floppy drive the kit cost , while an assembled system cost . With two drives the kit cost , while an assembled system cost . The unit shipped with MS-DOS and
Novell NetWare was available as an option; the Dimension was one of the first computers ever to offer NetWare as a software pack-in. The Dimension brought North Star out of its sales slump, and profits doubled into the second quarter of 1984.
After 1984 After giving North Star $3.7 million in debt financing,
Fortune Systems Corporation, a
Unix workstation manufacturer based in
Redwood City, California, was in talks to acquire North Star for $14 million in August 1984. The deal fell through in October 1984, however, with North Star and Fortune agreeing to collaborate on forthcoming hardware projects nonetheless. Among North Star's last products was an upgrade to the Dimension—the Dimension 300—in 1987, and the EL family of multi-user system
ISA expansion cards for the PC, based on the
Intel 8088,
286 and
386, in 1988. The company dissolved in 1989. == References ==