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 seemed to also mean that it actually became something of a standard in its own right, as later machines such as 1982's Decision 1 from Morrow had "North Star compatibility" as one of its benefits.

This computer - a Z80 CPU (it was also available with an Intel 8080) on an S-100 bus - looks more like a piece of furniture, with its plywood top and sides, and in some ways was years ahead of its time as it physically shares a lot with the generic beige boxes of the IBM PC era.

It retailed at $1899 (about £13,000 in 2024 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.

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.