CompuPro - History
CompuPro started out as a company call
Godbout Electronics founded by one of the legends of the early micro-computer
era, Bill Godbout. Unlike some of the other S-100 computer
founders Bill had quite a bit of experience in building and selling
computer/electronic equipment.
He
started in the business working as a manager and buyer for a guy named Mike
Quinn who had a legendry electronics equipment store near Oakland Airport in
California. Mike's store in the early 70's was a hive of activity where pioneers
in the field like
Lee
Felsenstein, Bob Marsh & Gordon French (
Processor
Tech) ,
George Morrow (
ThinkerToys, Morrow Designs) , Chuck Grant & Mark Greenberg
(
Northstar Computers) , Howard Fulmer (Equinox-100),
Brent Wright (
Fulcrum) and many others
hung out. Eventually Bill started his own mail order business in the early
1970's selling electronic experimenter kits. He setup in the building behind
Mike Quinn -- thereby always being in contact with new products, ideas and
people.
Bill started in the S-100 board
business in 1976 by selling RAM memory boards out of his Godbout Electronics
mail order business. His contacts and experience in getting chips fast and at
good prices help him get going quickly and allowed Godbout Electronics to fill a
market need for boards that Altair, IMASI and even Processor Technologies could
not meet in those early days. In the end Godbout/CopmuPro had more
different types of S-100 RAM boards than anybody else in the business. All their
boards were static RAM boards. As the business grew the evolved into most other
S-100 board types eventually putting together complete S-100 systems. Their
S-100 boxes were arguably the most solid and reliable ever made. His innovative
products played a large part in the success of the S-100. Bill played a major
role in setting the specs for the S-100 bus IEEE-696 standard, being one of its
authors.
CompuPro
made a number of complete
systems over the years. The CompuPro 8/16 came in various forms of
capability and probably represented the best example of a S-100 boards
cooperating with each other. It was one of the last commercial systems to come
out for the S-100 bus. There are still some of these boxes around still working!
At a late point in the companies history CompuPro started to call themselves
Viasyn. Late boards were labeled with this name.
The CompuPro 8/16 was probably the last commercial system to come out for
the S-100 that was marketed to both hobbyists and commercial users in the
mid to late 1980s. However like Cromemco, Compupro designed and sold
even more advanced systems based on the S-100 bus to commercial users up
until they went out of business in 1990/91. These systems were of little
interest to hobbyists because of their extreme cost, and the fact they were
primarily designed to support connections to multiple users each working at
a “dumb terminal”.
A note of caution: some of the later Viasyn boards and systems were run
without the voltage regulators on the boards. Instead, 5V was supplied on a
non-standard S-100 bus. If you put these boards into a standard S-100
system without the regulators reattached, you will fry the board IC's.
