Alpha Microsystems

Alpha Microsystems is a computer company founded in 1977 by John French, Dick Wilcox and Bob Hitchcock. The first Alpha Micro computer was the S-100 AM-100, based upon the WD16 microprocessor chipset from Western Digital. Later computers starting with the AM-100/L and the AM-1000 were based on the Motorola 68000 and succeeding processors, though Alpha Micro swapped several addressing lines to create byte-ordering compatibility with their earlier processor.

Early peripherals included standard Computer terminals (such models as Soroc, Hazeltine 1500, and Wyse WY50), Fortran punch card readers, 100 baud rate acoustic coupler modems (later upgraded to 300 baud modems), and 10 MB CDC Hawk hard drives with removable disk packs.

The company's primary claim to fame was selling inexpensive minicomputers that provided multi-user power using a proprietary operating system called AMOS (Alpha Micro Operating System). The operating system on the 68000 machines was called AMOS/L. The operating system had major similarities to the operating system of the DEC PDP-11. This may not be coincidental; legend has it that the founders based their operating system on "borrowed" source code from DEC, and DEC, perceiving the same, unsuccessfully tried to sue Alpha Micro over the similarities in 1984.

As Motorola stopped developing their 68000 product, Alpha Micro started to move to the x86 CPU family, used in common PCs. This was initially done with the Falcon cards, allowing standard DOS and later Windows-based PCs to run AMOS applications on the 68000-series CPU on the Falcon card. The work done on AMPC became the foundation for AMOS 8.x, which runs natively on x86, but includes a 68K emulator to run older software in a method similar to Apple Inc.'s Mac 68k emulator for PowerPC.

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