Ric Hammond, graduate of the
Thacher School and
UC Santa Barbara, founded Smoke Signal Broadcasting in 1976. The company was first headquartered in
Hollywood, California. Hammond had been an enthusiast of radio since at least the early 1960s; he was named president of the Thacher School's Amateur Radio Club when it opened up in 1962. During Smoke Signal's founding years, he simultaneously worked as programming director at
CBS Radio's
KNX-FM station in Los Angeles. He started Smoke Signal as a consulting business for broadcast entities. Hammond maintained a keen interest in computers since the early 1970s, having taken a three-day course at
Motorola to learn how to build a computer at the board level, but intended to keep Smoke Signal relevant to his interest in radio. However, after learning about the dearth of memory expansion and
peripherals for the
SS-50 bus used by the highly popular
Southwest Technical Products 6800 microcomputer, Hammond rectified this by designing the M-16-A, a 16 KB
static RAM board, marketing it as a Smoke Signal product. Released in late 1976, according to
Byte magazine, the M-16-A was the first expansion board manufactured independent of Southwest Technical Products for the SWTPC 6800. It was an instant success, with Hammond quickly becoming overwhelmed with orders for the board. By 1977, the company had fully shifted its business to offering expansions for the SWTPC. In the next year, they released a 5.25-inch floppy disk drive system, the BFD-68. This system housed up to three drives in one cabinet and came with a controller board to plug into the SS-50 bus of the SWTPC 6800, as well as OS-68, a
disk operating system similar to
Technical Systems Consultants's
FLEX that provided the SWTPC 6800 with a random-access
file system. The BFD-68 also proved popular among users of the SWTPC 6800 and inspired Smoke Signal to release their own
microcomputer based on the
Motorola 6800 microprocessor in 1978, after having moved to
Westlake Village, California. Called the Chieftain, this computer came equipped with a nine-slot motherboard with SS-50 compatibility, 32 KB of RAM—expandable up to 60 KB—two
serial ports, either two 5.25-inch or two 8-inch floppy drives, and an 80-by-25 character display. Smoke Signal aimed the Chieftain at scientific engineers and came included with OS-68. It sold the computer both directly to businesses and through computer retailers. The company offered the Chieftain only as an assembled computer—a somewhat unusual approach when most companies sold their computers as kits to be assembled by the end user, who were usually hobbyists. Hammond felt that this approach would both serve as a
value-add for hobbyists and would make it appealing to the non-hobbyist buyer. The Chieftain's use of a cooling fan and gold-plated
edge connectors for reliability was also relatively novel for 6800-based computers, as noted by
Personal Computing magazine. The Chieftain's case bore a
faux-leather finish, according to technologist Bill von Hagen, in keeping with Smoke Signal's
Native American corporate identity. The computer soon found commercial buyers among
Hughes Aircraft and
Western Electric, who used it for industrial
process control. Computer journalist and collector Michael Nadeau called the Chieftain one of the best SWTPC-based computers ever made. Smoke Signal released a
single-board computer a year after the Chieftain, called the SCB-68. It featured the same 6800 processor as the Chieftain but only 1 KB of
scratch-pad RAM and 2 KB of
EPROM standard. Users could add 18 KB worth of additional EPROMs as well as a
math co-processor, a
real-time clock, and serial ports. The company adopted design elements of the SS-50 bus for this single-board computer. ==1980–1984: Restructuring==