North Star Advert - November 1977

photo from a review of the North Star Dimension in Personal Computer World, © Personal Computer World March 1985The North Star Horizon might be filed under the "who or what?" category of computers, however judging by the regularity of the company's adverts in magazines of the day it was around for quite a while - from 1977 until at least 1985.

That would make North Star one of only a handful of companies to successfully make the transition from the world of first-generation micros of the 1970s to the new world order of the 80s.

The longevity of the company also meant that it actually became something of a standard in its own right, as later machines such as 1982's Decision 1 from Morrow Designs, or Hotel Microsytems' Minstrel from 1983, had "North Star compatibility" as a feature.

In Morrow's case this was because North Star Computers itself had formed after a 1976 project between George Morrow of Morrow Designs, Bill Godbout, Chuck Grant, and Mark Greenberg to build a 16-bit microcomputer based upon National Semiconductors' PACE CPU had failed due to differences of opinion.

After the colloboration collapsed, the latter two - Grant and Greenberg - left to form North Star, clearly on amicable-enough terms that Morrow would later give a nod to North Star in his later microcomputers.

The new North Star company, which was initially set to be called Kentucky Fried Computer^[1], initially sold IMSAI's 8080 by mail order, before creating its own S-100 floppy-disk system, becoming one of the first companies to supply the newer "minifloppy" disks in quantity.

By early 1979, around 10,000 floppy disk systems had been sold, with the software that came with it - a disk operating system and an extended BASIC - being considered by Practical Computing as some of the most reliable personal computer software available^[2].

Inside a North Star Horizon, showing the twelve-slot S-100 motherboard. From Practical Computing, April 1979

After an almost-immediate follow-up of a hardware-based floating-point-maths S-100 board, North Star's next step was to begin building its own complete S-100-based systems^[3], with the first being the Horizon, launched in 1977.

This computer, which ran a Zilog Z80 or an Intel 8080 CPU on an S-100 bus with either CP/M or the company's own NSDOS operating system, looks more like a piece of furniture, with its plywood top and sides.

It retailed at $1899 (about £13,900 in 2026 terms) which put it way above the cost of a PET or even an Apple II, both of which launched in this year. However, it apparently found a niche in universities, due to its S-100 bus and therefore the large number of interface cards available.

One of Comart's North Star Horizon boards - the Comart VDM display module, which included VDM *Star word processing software, so the machine could become an instant "word processor". From Practical Computing, January 1980

The Horizon was popular enough in the UK that its reseller - Comart - ended up branching out by building its own third-party plug-in boards for the machine, as apparently North Star's own were hard to come by in the UK.

Comart was still in this business at the beginning of 1980, when it released a plug-in "instant word processor" board - the Comart VDM Display Module, with the VDM *Star word-processing package.

North Star, meanwhile, continued into the 1980s and in the late summer of 1984 was nearly bought by well-funded Unix systems company Fortune, in a deal worth around $13.5 million^[4], or about £39 million in 2026 money.

The Unix company had already lent North Star $3.75 million, which after the potential buyout failed was converted to a 19% stake in the company. North Star was eventually disolved in 1989^[5].