Processor Technology

~ the eulogy ~

Processor Technology opened in april 1975 in Berkeley, founded by Bob Marsh and Gary Ingram, and its first product was a 4K memory board for somebody else's computer. The MITS Altair 8800 had shipped that january with memory boards that did not reliably work, and Processor Technology sold a replacement that did. That is the entire origin of the personal computer aftermarket in one transaction: the first thing anybody built for the first machine was a fix for it.

More boards followed on the S-100 bus, and among them was the VDM-1, a video display module that let a machine put characters on a monitor without a separate terminal. Les Solomon, technical editor at Popular Electronics, wanted an intelligent terminal for a cover story and asked Marsh and Lee Felsenstein to design it. What they brought him was not a terminal. The Sol-20 was on the july 1976 cover, first units shipped that december, and the name was Solomon's own, shortened.

The Sol-20 ran an Intel 8080 at 2 MHz behind a full-stroke QWERTY keyboard built into the case. It drove a 64 by 16 character display straight to a composite monitor and carried its own power supply. The S-100 bus underneath took whatever else you wanted to add. System I with 8K of memory was $1,649 as a kit and $2,129 assembled. System III with 32K and floppy support ran to $5,450. Around 10,000 were built between 1977 and 1979, which made it one of the better-selling machines of its moment.

Then 1977 happened to everybody in this business at once, and Processor Technology had no answer to it. The Apple II and the TRS-80 arrived as products rather than as kits with a magazine article attached, and the Sol-20 stayed the Sol-20. There was a disk system, the Helios II, and no successor computer. The company ceased operations on 14 may 1979.

All of this finished over five years before I was born, so I am reading it the same way anybody else can. The part that stays interesting to me is an argument the Sol-20 was making that nobody had settled yet, which is that a computer should be one object you carry to a desk and switch on, rather than a chassis with a separate terminal standing next to it. I spend my working life now deciding what goes inside one enclosure and what stays outside it, on hardware that flies, and the question has not changed shape at all. Only the answers have.

~ the dossier ~

~ the box ~

The case is the thing people remember and it was a deliberate piece of work. Blue metal with walnut sides, and the walnut was offcut stock from a gun stock manufacturer, which is why the sides look like furniture rather than like a computer of 1976. Felsenstein had designed it to be sold in a shop to a person, at a time when the competition was designed to be sold in a magazine to a hobbyist.

Inside, the video work is the piece that mattered technically. The VDM-1 approach put character generation outside the processor rather than making the 8080 draw everything itself, so the Sol-20 could show text without a teletype and without a terminal costing as much as the computer. CONSOL, the built-in operating firmware, came up on power without a bootstrap ritual. For 1976, switching a machine on and getting a prompt was not a small thing.

~ the postmortem ~

Nothing dramatic happened. No fraud, and nobody sued it out of business. Processor Technology sold about ten thousand computers in three years and then did not build another kind, in the exact window when the market moved from people who wanted to assemble a machine to people who wanted to buy one. The Sol-20 had been designed for the first group and was good enough to sell to the second, but a company that ships one product and then edits it is betting that the market will hold still.

By may 1979 the shelf that a Sol-20 sat on had an Apple II beside it with a floppy drive and a software catalog that a small board house in Emeryville was never going to match. Operations ceased on the fourteenth of that month. VisiCalc shipped in october, five months after there was anybody left in Emeryville to worry about it. The building at 6200 Hollis Street is still there.

~ the inheritance ~

Felsenstein went from the Sol-20 to designing the Osborne 1, which took the same instinct further and put the screen in the case too, then sold in numbers that Processor Technology never saw before collapsing in its own way. That lineage is the real estate this company owns: the all-in-one machine, the keyboard as part of the computer rather than as a peripheral you buy separately.

The other inheritance is quieter and it belongs to the memory board rather than to the Sol. Processor Technology proved that a market exists for parts that fit into somebody else's computer and work better than the parts that came with it, which is an industry that has never once stopped since 1975. The company that invented it lasted four years.

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