Processor Technology was founded by Gary Ingram and Bob
Marsh, mutual friends in Berkley CA who had been attending the early Bay Area
Homebrew Computer Club meetings in the mid 70's. At the meetings they heard many
complaints from members about the early
Altair 4K Dynamic RAM kits and their unreliability. They decided to
build and market a 4K static RAM kit for the Altair themselves.
They became swamped with orders even
before they actually made boards. The instant success of this board launched the company
"Processor Technology". They setup operations in Emeryville, CA. Their
board soon was been used in other S-100 systems as well. It got a good
reputation for reliability.
Next they went on to produce an 18-slot
S-100 motherboard -- to replace the wire to wire Altair primitive 4 slot one.
This was followed by a 2K EPROM board followed by an I/O board the 3P+S that was
very popular.
However what really put the company on
the map was their VDM-1 board. This video display board came out when people
were still using teletypes to communicate with the computer. This "glass
teletype" was a marvel to many hobbyist. Don Lancaster in a pivotal Radio Electronics Magazine (and subsequent book)
had published an article describing how to make such a terminal in 1973. The
VDM-1 was the first implementation of the concept on an S-100 board. A
user could connect a keyboard to the computer through the 3P+S Board, plug-in
the VDM-1, connect it to a video monitor, and the computer became its own video
terminal. The VDM-1 also ran one of the first action video games. Steve Dompier's,
"Target". It shot arrows at targets moving across the screen.
At this point Processor Technology was
on a roll. Bob Marsh and Lee Felsenstein, decided to build their own complete S-100 bus based system.
Unlike other S-100 systems at the time, theirs would contain in one box not only
the motherboard, boards etc but a keyboard and video display card. To add
class the sides of the unit were done in walnut wood. Unusual too, to
reduce height the S-100 boards were placed horizontally. Five S-100 boards could
be placed in the unit. It was called the SOL computer (after Les Solomon,
the tech editor of Popular Electronics) -- who got them going by
describing it in the magazine.
The SOL was met with great success
initially. In fact in 1977 it was the number one S-100 computer sold in stores.
Processor Technology established a nationwide dealer network and developed a
very loyal user group network.
Then things started to go wrong.
The company outgrew its Emeryville headquarters and move out to the East Bay to
a plush location in Pleasanton CA., away from the core of the industry.
They had developed a very popular
cassette storage system for the SOL and started to address disk storage.
Initially they had worked with a company called Diablo (of Diablo printers fame)
and spent time and effort putting together a disk operating system for this new
hardware. Unfortunately Diablo got acquired by Xerox who dropped the disk drive
effort and Processor Technology was back to square one.
They then retooled to utilize Persci
270 drives. Like a few others, this too was a bad choice. While fast with their
voice coil head positioning the drives constantly went out of alignment. Their
"Helios" system as it was called began to developed a bad reputation.----Compounding the above problems, the
company seemed to loose touch with its roots. The world had moved away from the
8080 to faster Z80 systems and more cost and space effective mini-disk systems.
First NorthStar, Vector Graphics, Cromemco and later Radio Shack invaded their
business domain. The company just faded away. The company close its door in May
1979. Nevertheless there were/are 1000's of SOL's out there.
