Generic Computer Products & Portland Board

[rankeney]

For those of you who remember, I was the principal for Generic Computer Products (GCP) and the Portland Board companies. GCP made the MEM+ board which provided 56K static RAM, a floppy disk controller, a batttery-backed up real-time clock and a parallel printer port. For more than 1 user it managed to replace 7 different OSI boards. I think I was a bit crazy to make the board back then, as I used gold-plated machine-screw sockets and gold-plated molex connectors and charged less than my competition.

I also created a few marketing flops like the Color-Plus board which came either as a backplane version or a C2 version with a 16-pin ribbon cable. The board had a TI 9918 graphics chip which gave a blistering 256x192 pixels in (if I remember right) 16 colors. The cool part about the chip was it supported sprites. I hacked the OS-65D Basic to add commands for doing graphics and sprite control.

Sadly, I no longer have any of the documentation that went with these.

I also wrote an operating system called GenerOS (Generic Operating System). As you can see I was a marketing genius. Ah, well. I always wondered if people took the products less seriously because of my choice of company name...
GenerOS had a nice 6502 assembler and came with a full-fledged TECO text editor, both of which I wrote. For those of you unfamiliar with TECO, it was a powerful character-oriented text editor used on DEC computers. Sadly, the only part of GenerOS remaining in the world that I know of is the source to TECO for the 6502. You can find it at:
http://www.decuslib.com/decus/vmslt96a/tecoarch/

I also designed the Portland Board, which was for use with multi-user OS-65U systems, and gave each user their own 4MHz processor and RAM. It proved quite a hit, under-pricing and outperforming the competitor Denver Board. My partner Keith Brown modified OS-65U to support the board. The main 6502 processor became not just a user but the I/O processor handling all I/O requests from other users. After OSI was acquired by Isotron, they purchased Portland Boards from us and called them (if I remember correctly) the 570 board.

I originally fell in love with the C3 system, envisioning all the cool things I could do with the 3 different processors. Sadly, I never bothered (like most folks) to use the other 2. One day Ron Fial from Fial Computer in Portland, OR demonstrated the system to me and several other folks at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI). We soon bought one. Not long after that I had my own, and started designing away. One of the first Color+ boards was used in an exhibit for turtle graphics I developed for the museum.

Ah, well, enough for now. Feel free to ask any questions. Sorry I have no OSI documents to contribute.

Robert Ankeney

[nama]

Thanks for your write-up on your personal OSI history. Quite interesting reading about all the stuff you made. It's a shame that none of your old Portland Boards stuff exists anymore, as I'm sure Dave would have been excited to add the contents to his page.

Phil

[dave]

Welcome Robert!

Thanks for posting here. I actually have a Color-Plus board (photo below). You may have noticed that the documentation is actually on my wish-list on the front page. However, I suspect that the 9918 data sheet will go a long way toward that end. It's a shame the drivers and docs are lost. The card is really nice. I'd love to get it running some day.

What drew you to OSI in the first place? In my case, I was more interested in hacking the hardware than writing video games, and I viewed the OSI as a virtual digital electronics course in a box. I never really was exposed to the higher-end OSI stuff, except through the OSI literature, but is sounds as if that was your stomping ground. I'd love to hear more of your story, if you get the chance.

Best regards,

Dave

ColorPlus2.jpg (165.62 KiB) Viewed 5548 times

[Steve Gray]

Hi,

I remember reading about this board back then. It's funny, I recently became interested in the descendents of this chip (V9938 and V9958), which are used in MSX computers. I picked up a couple from ebay with the hopes of someday doing something with them. Perhap a future OSI project!

Thanks for the picture. In the Commodore world I have found that just putting stuff like this on the internet can lead to other people discovering it, digging through their old stuff and pulling it out to share. So, perhaps someone else will have the disks or drivers, schematics, whatever. That's part of the fun...

Steve