A couple of days ago I had the pleasure of meeting a gentlemen with whom (as usual) I got around to reminiscing about early acquaintances with computers. He told me that in 1980, when the company he was with "computerized" (a bold step back then, remember), the hardware they went for was the NorthStar Horizon.

He reckons that (although it looked just like the illustration), the case was actually faux wood. Their machine had 64 KB of memory, two 5¼" floppy drives and ran NorthStar DOS on CP/M . At the time the quoted price for the computer plus a VDU and printer (NEC Spinwriter) was £ 5,500.

He then started to learn to program in NorthStar DOS and became quite proficient over a period of about ten years until the office moved on to MS-DOS when they "upgraded" to two Amstrad 1640 machines. The NorthStar supplier was able to convert all the software from CP/M to MS-DOS (using MegaBasic, apparently). smile

For those who may be interested, here is some more on NorthStar. Plus even more! And here is a MegaBasic manual .pdf.

If you don't inspect ... don't expect.