North Star Computers

~ the last words ~

The company sold its first machines as Kentucky Fried Computer, out of a garage on Fourth Street in Berkeley, until the people who own that name found out and made it stop. Charles Grant and Mark Greenberg incorporated the renamed version on 11 June 1976. Their first product was a floating point board for the S-100 bus, because in 1976 the way into the business was to sell one card to people who already had a machine that could not do something.

The product that made them was the Micro-Disk System in 1977, a 5.25 inch floppy setup at around $700 in kit form, cheap enough that a hobbyist could stop using cassette tape. It shipped with North Star DOS and North Star BASIC in the box, which tells you what the era was like: the company selling you a disk drive also wrote the operating system and the language, because there was not yet a default for either.

Then came the Horizon in October 1977, a Z80A machine with the drives built in and a wooden lid on top, $1,599 as a kit and $1,899 assembled for the single-drive version. It sold for years. By June 1981 the company was claiming over 28,000 of them in use worldwide, and 1982 brought $41 million of revenue and $3.69 million of profit after tax, which was the high-water mark and the last good year.

What decided whether a machine was any use where I grew up was much simpler than any of this: whether a disk somebody handed you would read on your drive. That was the whole test, applied to Turkish school computer rooms in the nineties as much as to Californian offices in 1979. North Star built a business on a floppy format that answered no to that question, and no amount of engineering merit gets you past it.

~ the record ~

~ the ten sectors ~

North Star used hard-sectored floppies, where the physical holes punched in the disk mark where each sector begins, instead of the soft-sectored format that writes those markers in software. Hard sectoring was defensible in 1977. The controller is simpler and cheaper, and cheap controllers were the reason the disk system cost $700 instead of two thousand.

The cost showed up later and it was not paid in dollars. Software written for a North Star arrived on North Star media, and the CP/M world that formed around soft-sectored disks could not simply hand a program across. Every port needed somebody to care enough to make one. The company stayed with the format long after the market had picked the other one, and by the time it mattered the argument was over.

~ the long slide ~

The Advantage in 1982 was an all-in-one machine with 640 by 240 graphics, and it sold into a market that was already tipping toward the IBM PC. The Dimension in 1984 was the sensible answer, a multi-user PC-compatible system with the processing shared out from a central box, and it did pull sales back up for a while. Neither product changed the underlying problem, which was that a small business buying its first computer in 1984 bought the one its accountant's software ran on, and that machine came from Boca Raton.

Manufacturing had moved from Berkeley to San Leandro by then. The end was quiet enough that no trade paper seems to have covered it properly: North Star Computers was dissolved on 1 June 1989, ten days short of thirteen years from the day it was incorporated. Greenberg died in 1996 at fifty. What survives is on shelves in collections, still in the wooden case, because it turns out the last thing anybody was going to throw away was the one that looked like furniture.

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