Posted on 11/14/2018 10:28:34 PM PST by bunkerhill7
Microcomputer inventor, 79, is among the 51 dead in devastating California wildfires as hunt for more victims continues- Bill Godbout, 79, died on Thursday when the wildfire burned down his Concow home and workshop Godbout was 'a legend in the S-100 community for his 1970s-1980s work at Godbout Electronics and CompuPro'
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I never knew him but I shopped at his old corrugated steel electronics surplus shop at Oakland Airport many times. It had essentially zero organization but if you spent enough time there, you could probably find most anything you were looking for. I guess that was part of the appeal.
I remember his psychedelic ads in BYTE magazine. RIP, Bill Godbout.
I am just amazed that the fire could completely decimate every car and house, and yet the pines trees still have all their needles.
I didn’t know him but his name brings back memories. I was a teenage electronics geek when the first microcomputers, often in kit from, became available. He was a pioneer in the microcomputer business. This is so sad. RIP.
You gotta love places like that.
RIP
This fire is the most under reported news item in the country.
I can get tubes, transistors and military surplus?
Cool
I knew him, too. He was among my electronics mentors, and paid me to build up boards for him when people ordered “Assembled and Tested” kits.
RIP, Bill.
Lots of underbrush to burn apparently. Pines need fire for their seeds to germinate. It's a part of the natural life of the forest. Unfortunately the envirowhackos have been making sure that normal wildfires are suppressed. This means you get a much hotter fire when it does come through, because there is a surplus of fuel.
Some live pine trees posses a natural flame retardant. A dead dried out pine tree will go up in flames like a roman candle.
I couldn’t place the name so I checked Wikipedia. He’s the guy who invented the expansion bus for the Altair 8800, which was the first PC marketed featuring a Microsoft OS (Altair BASIC) on an Intel chipset, which because the gold standard for PC configuration once IBM released the 5150 (PC DOS on an Intel 8088).
I loved it then; it was in a dark beat to hell quonset hut bldg at Oakland airport. No tubes, really, though I found a brand new in the box GE 6550 once. (Still have it! almost 40 years later!)
When I went there often, it was about 1978-1980ish, at the very very front end of uprocessors and 256K ROM/RAM; I was not much interested in that area, to my detriment. He had circuits to flash a bunch of LEDs (which were probably about a buck each instead of 5 cents.)
ALL Electronics in LA and Apex Surplus are probably the remaining places; but nothing is cheap any more; those guys know that for every $1 part they sell you there’s a 55 gallon drum full of crap that will sit around forever.
Nowadays, I can hardly justify getting involved with the stuff. There is nothing you can build anywhere near as cheaply as you can buy it. and I CAN’T READ the teeny little writing on the parts any more.
Of course the granddaddy of them all was Radio Row in NYC near where I grew up in Joisey. All torn down for the WTC by the early 70’s. I used to take the bus into NYC when I was 10-14 years old, imagine that, and wander around there all day long, I loved it. The incredibly grimy stores with the weirdest stuff. And the guys who ran them, equally as grimy as their stores. “Hey kid, you think I’m doing this for my health? Whaddya want?”
RIP.
It was a fun time. My new wife was very patient with me during our trips from the south Bay Area up to Santa Rosa. I would stop at every computer store along the way.
I assembled an IMSAI 8080 that I bought from "Kentucky Fried Computers" in Berkeley. Many early computer enthusiasts used electro-mechanical teletypes to interface with their computers. I wanted to make my own equivalent with a tv monitor and an electronic keyboard.
I well remember the day when a guy in one of the computer stores explained to me how the handshake interface worked to pass a byte to the monitor card. It was the last step I needed before being able to boot up my IMSAI and get the "Ready" prompt. What a satisfying day.
I still have the IMSAI computer above the rafters in my garage. I hope someday to fire it up for the amusement of my grandson who is three. It'll be a while I think.
Good times!
Remember core memory?
The 1st modern confuser I ever worked on was based on the 8080 chipset, a Zenith Z100.
That was cutting edge in 1980.
The Navy in 1980 thought the Z100 was the shizzle.
Then we got a portable Kaypro III LOL it had a modem!
It was like 96K baud LOL
Anyone remember loading software from tapes by finger boning addresses in in octal? Remember paper tapes?
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