General Automation

~ the obit ~

A marketing executive and a salesman walked out of Honeywell in 1968 and started building computers in Orange, California. Burt Yale and Larry Goshorn had the SPC-12 out the door in January of that first year at $6,400, with another $4,000 of options they threw in free, which tells you exactly which end of the market they were aiming at. It was an eight-bit machine with a twelve-bit address space, carrying 4,096 bytes of memory at a cycle time of 2.2 microseconds. A real-time clock and a teletype interface came as standard.

The clever part was a shared command scheme that let eight-bit memory carry twelve-bit instructions, a trick you invent when the parts budget is fixed and the specification is not. Five months later came the GA 18/30, built to run IBM 1130 and 1800 software on cheaper iron, and that remained the business model for twenty years. Take an architecture somebody else had already established, undercut the price of it, and keep whichever customers could not reach the original.

It worked for a while and then it worked less. Sales reached $10.6 million in 1971 and $30.4 million by 1973. By 1990 the company turned over $39.2 million and lost money on it. In 1994 it announced it was leaving Anaheim for Irvine, phasing out its manufacturing and keeping fifty people.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the three thousand dollars ~

In 1971 General Automation made its first profit. It was three thousand dollars, on sales of $10.6 million, a margin of roughly nothing that still went into the annual report. The executive vice-president who arrived that year was Ray Noorda, who left to run Novell and turn NetWare into the default way an office network was built in the 1990s.

The hardware kept chasing whatever silicon was cheapest. The LSI-12/16 of January 1974 used silicon-on-sapphire circuits supplied by Rockwell International, and when the GA 16/110 arrived in December 1976 it was built around a two-chip microprocessor from Synertek. Buying companies worked less well: Parallel Computers, Inc. came in during 1987 for its fault-tolerant Unix machines and went out again the following year.

~ zebra, and the system you have never heard of ~

The thing that kept General Automation alive into the 1990s was not its own engineering. It was Pick, a database operating system that started life in the 1960s as a system called GIRLS and reached the market in 1973 when Microdata shipped it as Reality. Pick treated the filesystem and the database as the same object, which made it extraordinarily well suited to business record keeping and almost invisible outside it.

Every vendor who licensed Pick gave it a different name, so Applied Digital Data Systems sold it as Mentor while Ultimate Corp sold it as Ultimate. General Automation's was Zebra, running on Motorola 68000 hardware from 1985, with Xenix available instead if a customer wanted plain Unix. Pick-derived databases are still sold and maintained in 2026, under names like UniVerse and D3.

~ the document that closes it ~

By 2002 General Automation was doing business as GA eXpress, Inc., a Delaware corporation filing from Suite 906 at 938 Howe Street in Vancouver. On Wednesday 10 September 2003 it filed a Notice of Intention to Make a Proposal under Canada's Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, with a list of its creditors attached, and named D. Manning & Associates as trustee. The same day, a group of secured lenders led by Pacific Mezzanine Fund went to the Supreme Court of British Columbia and asked for a receiver. Justice McEwan granted the order the same day, appointing MacKay & Company Ltd as Receiver Manager over all assets "wheresoever located, present and future", with power to act at once.

The 8-K reporting both events is dated 8 October 2003 and signed on the ninth by MacKay & Company on the company's behalf. A firm that had shipped its first minicomputer thirty-five years earlier, from a building in Orange County, closed its public record with a form filled in by the people winding it up.

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