Alpha Micro - History
Alpha Microsystems was founded in 1977 by
John French, Dick Wilcox and Bob Hitchcock. The first Alpha Micro computer was
the S-100 based AM-100. It was a two board set. The CPU was the WD16
microprocessor chipset (5) from
Western Digital. The WD16 was a 16 bit CPU, completely symmetric source
and destination addressing modes. There were eight main addressing modes and a
number of variations. It had block move, block I/O, and multi-bit shifts and
rotates. It even had five 48-bit floating point instructions, ADD, SUB, MUL,
DIV, and CMP. All running at 2MHz. Eventually the speed went up to 3.3 MHZ.
Later computers starting with the AM-100/L and the AM-1000 were based on the
Motorola 68000 and succeeding processors, though Alpha Micro swapped several
addressing lines to create byte-ordering compatibility with their earlier
processor. The company's primary claim to fame was selling minicomputers that
provided multi-user power using their proprietary operating system called AMOS
(Alpha Micro Operating System). AMOS had major similarities to the operating
system of the DEC PDP-11. This may not be coincidental; legend has it that the
founders based their operating system on "borrowed" source code from DEC, and
DEC, perceiving the same, unsuccessfully tried to sue Alpha Micro over the
similarities in 1984.
As Motorola stopped developing their 68000 product, Alpha Micro started to move
to the x86 CPU family. This was initially done with their "Falcon" cards,
allowing standard DOS and later Windows-based PCs to run AMOS applications on
the 68000-series CPU using the Falcon card. Later AMOS version 8, ran natively
on x86 CPU's, but includes a 68K emulator to run older software. For application
development, AMOS used their own BASIC-like language called Alpha BASIC. Early
Alpha Micro System using the AM-100 CPU could have up to nine users and two
spooled printers attached to it. It supported all of them typically in 300K or
more of RAM. It had an 8" 40 megabyte Quantum hard drive. This drive had four
platters and eight heads. The system also typically had a Control Data Hawk 5
meg fixed and a 5 meg removable drive and two 8" single sided floppies with 250K
each for data backup.
In the past, Alpha Micro bundled their operating system and tools such as BASIC
as part of the hardware sale. Gradually, Alpha Micro transitioned to charging
for their software as hardware became more of a commodity item. The Alpha Micro
computer never achieved mainstream name recognition, though it had been
traditionally popular in certain vertical markets, particularly medical and
dental offices.
Alpha Micro went through a confusing series of name swaps and changes of
ownership in the late 1990s and early 2000s, although all of them were still
informally called Alpha Micro. In 1999 they were called AlphaServ.com, in 2000
they were AlphaCONNECT. In 2001, the product division was split off and
acquired by AMOS vendor Birmingham Data Systems' Alpha Micro Products branch
(AMP), while AMSO was sold to the service firm Optimal Robotics. In 2003 AMP
bought back the Alpha Microsystems and AMSO trademarks where they currently
remain.
Alpha Micro was never in the realm of computer hobbyists, their systems were
simply too expensive. That said they were the first S-100 board company to
utilize the S-100 bus for a 16 bit CPU. However it should be remembered that
Alpha Micro utilized some of the unused original S-100 bus lines for their own
purposes. For example they had 7 DMA request lines ((pins 63-56). Thus their
boards would not work in a IEEE-696 system. Indeed they may not work with many
older non-Alpha Micro S-100 boards.
This page was last modified
on
01/08/2011
