NorthStar launched this indestructible all-in-one system in 1982.
The Advantage combined the well known (at the time) NorthStar 5.25 floppy disc sub-system with a high-resolution display and a durable keyboard. The Advantage also had it's own bus with it's own set of optional I/O card and a 8088 co-processor card for comparability with the newly released IBM PC software. Sadly, the card was delivered with MS-DOS ver.1 which wasn't compatible with the IBM-PC PC-DOS and very few programs were developed for this OS.
Despite some interesting features - High resolution graphics display, 8 and 16-bit software compatibility - and a proven reliability, the Advantage never really competed with Apple and IBM-PC systems
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More information from Jim who worked for NorthStar from 1979: Kentucky Fried Computer (KFC) was the original name of the company in their garage building stage, and was quickly changed to NorthStar when they found commercial potential.
One great feature of the Advantage was that it had an IBM Selectric (as in typewriters) keyboard. Very high quality, and familiar to typists. There was a 16 bit add-in card that ran generic MSDOS 1. The display allowed to run graphic games like Asteroid, and could display foreign character sets. Many were sold outside the US.
It also had networking cards, called NorthNet (I don't remember the protocol) to link many Advantages together, when this was just a dream for IBM.
As you said, it came out about the time of the IBM PC, which pretty much killed it, mostly because people didn't understand the technology.
T. N French adds:
Early versions of NorthNet were SNA None Return to Zero Inverted (NRZI). Netbios came along. NorthStar also developed an add-on that ran PC-DOS.
The hard sectored drives were notorious for getting out of alignment. I think that is what really killed the system (PC-DOS and IBM didn't help)
I was working for GBC at the time and we re-badged the product line (Advantage = System 9 and Horizon = System 12).
Hard disks were available with 5, 10 and 30 Mb runnig MFM.
One appeared in the BBC show "Making the Most of the Micro" - I'm watching an old copy now. It was running some kind of database program to illustrate how they could be used on Micros with Ian MacNaught-Davies.
Wednesday 23rd April 2008
Chris (Edinburgh, Scotland)
I have one. I got it twenty years ago. It was wonderfull for me (twenty years ago). I made software in Z80 machine code with this computer. Now I still have it in my old thins store and it is plenty of dust. How many useful scrap are there in our personal stores? Somebody can make somethin with all this old computers?
Monday 18th September 2006
Felix (Spain)
I used an Advantage in a music retail store in 1983 as a database system (dBase for C/PM, as I recall) and wrote a simple point-of-sales application in CBASIC for it. It ran the compiled BASIC program blazingly fast compared to running interpreted BASIC on an Apple ][ (my personal computer at the time) and taught me the value of structured programming! My dream was to create a networked POS-DB system for the store but the owner never financed the plan. I had a short career being a NorthStar consultant for two other businesses whom had bought them, just by virtue of having used one, before being hired away by a start-up software company, and I never saw a NorthStar again. It was a bulletproof machine with a very nice keyboard, but I agree with N.T. French regarding the disk drive problems -- the machine had to be recalibrated by NorthStar - twice.
Thursday 24th February 2005
Joey Swails (USA)
NAME
Advantage
MANUFACTURER
Northstar
TYPE
Professional Computer
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
1982
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
None
KEYBOARD
Full-stroke 79 keys with function keys and numeric keypad
CPU
Z80 or 8088
SPEED
3.5 Mhz. (Z80)
CO-PROCESSOR
8084 for display and disk management
RAM
64 KB expandable to 256 KB
VRAM
32 KB - 20 KB actually used - Extra 12 KB was reserved for
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