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Bill Godbout, Early S-100 Bus Pioneer, Perished In the Camp Wildfire (vcfed.org)
evanak writes: Bill Godbout was one of the earliest and most influential supports of the S-100 bus in the mid-1970s. He passed away last week due to the Camp wildfire in Concow, California, according to a Vintage Computer Federation blog post. More than 50 other people also died in the fires, but chances are Mr. Godbout was the only one with a license to fly blimps. "Godbout was born October 2, 1939," the blog post reads. "He talked about his introduction to computing in an interview with InfoWorld magazine for their February 18, 1980 issue. 'My first job out of college was with IBM. I served a big-system apprenticeship there, but I think the thing that really triggered [my interest] was the introduction of the 8008 by Intel,' he said. 'I was fascinated that you could have that kind of capability in a little 18-pin package.'"
Godbout's family has set up a GoFundMe campaign to support their needs in this difficult time.
Godbout's family has set up a GoFundMe campaign to support their needs in this difficult time.
By all means, donate what you can to help the CA fire victims. Most donation centers are now saying they have enough of many supplies (clothing, etc, are just piling up), and they mostly need money now, which can be converted into whatever the most urgent local needs are.
However, be careful: there have been a number of "disaster scammers" setting up fake donation sites and absconding with the money. So donate via reputable organizations, or do your due diligence to verify what you are donating to.
But do donate! A whole city was wiped off the map. 71 confirmed deaths so far, with over 1000 missing and many of the missing being elderly people who could not quickly evac and probably burned to death. Firefighters are finding charred remains huddled in cars. Tens of thousands have lost their homes, their pets, and the very fabric of their lives.
It's really bad. So go donate. Just use some common sense in the process.
He actually do be having a wikipedia page tho
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Godbout
So evil and in more ways than we have seen. You could always just abandon the rest of those households. I canâ(TM)t wait for the directors cut
Godbout dates from the wild west days of personal computers. It was a bottom up phenomenon, driven by legions of hackers who passed knowledge through users groups, 73 Magazine, self-published mimeographed "books". In the early days, a 300 baud modem and a real keyboard were a dream. An old Model 33 ASR TTY meant you had hit the "big time". Corporate American hadn't a clue. The personal microcomputer revolution happened under the radar in garages, basements, and bedrooms. Godbout was there front and center, and anyone who was there in those days knows him, or about him, or did business with him.
Rest in peace, old timer.
I remember spending many a pleasant Saturday out at the electronic junk store at the Oakland Airport back in the early 1970's where Bill worked. I can't think of the name of the place at the moment but I'm sure it will all come back later tonight for surely I'll be remembering him and his personal contributions to my life. I remember helping him sort and test parts in between spending hours perusing all of the amazing things there. Bill could explain it all and he was on top of everything going on in the industry back then and I learned much from him. He handed me the first microprocessor that I ever held in my hands. Sometimes he had rejects from the new companies down the road and he would come up with things to do with them anyway. Later he went on to design many things and had success at S100 memory boards but I had gone in other directions and never saw him again. So sad to hear this news. I've often wondered where he ended up. He was one of the people instrumental in making the better parts of the world what they are today. RIP.
It came from PGE DEFECT powerline
stop saying CAMP FIRE
Depends on how old you were. S100 was a big deal back in the 70s.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I only talked to Bill through mail when I was in University - I was building an S-100 Z-80 CPM system and needed some suggestions on how to architect the video driver. Bill pointed me to some reference drawings on the MOT 6845 (same as the original IBM PC) that I could use along with providing me with some software to go with it. The only thing he asked of me was that I pass along the information to anybody who asked.
We lost touch after I got my system working and I always wondered what happened to him.
RIP. He showed me the value of Open Source.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
.... but donations required!
Nuff said.
Ezekiel 23:20
All these innocent lives lost to climate change and STILL, Trump does nothing about it!
Did the authorities screw up and not tell people to leave? Did people not leave? Were people unable to leave?
The stories all cover the amount of people dead or missing, but there seems to be no coverage as to the why.
I guess you never read Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor columns in Byte Magazine back in the day.
lol
Fuck yourself.
I have been watching this fire grow for sometime now. Every night I turn on the tv and Iâ(TM)m horrified by how far it has spread. It seems like the fire spreads faster on a daily basis than anyone could have predicted and it breaks its own records every day. Thinking of these poor people I just want to hide my head under the blankets. I canâ(TM)t even imagine the Herculean effort that will be required to build an entire forest from nothing. We should all be thankful that such dedication exists among public servants. They are all the same in every way we know of. Give a prayer of thanks before you go back to posting about coffee
Enjoy your spotted owl habit.
Whatever you do don't leave CA with your insurance payout. Just stay there please.
I'm pretty sure lots of people have read Paul Freiberger's Fire in the Valley, which is how I knew who he was. Very sad.
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
hardly anybody has ever heard of this person. His biggest claim to fame is dying in the 2018 Cali Camp Fire.
A person that would point that out is who really deserves to die in a fire.
You disgusting Slashtards aren't even human.
Burn to death.
I didn't say he deserved to die in a fire. And only losers like you use 'tard' as an insult.
PlanetVulkan.com
Who could forget Ample Annie?
I just barely missed the S-100 era. By the time I had my first exposure to computers in 1981, the schools here were on TRS-80 systems (Models I and III), and the big epeen to strive for was the Apple ][ Plus.
My first of my own though was just a TI-99/4a (last minute save because the 'rents were seriously considering a $99 Timex-Sinclair 1000). What little social life I had at that time went instantly to zero for most of my high school years.
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They weren't culling deadwood and managing the forest around their town. All the dead wood and brush is/was a tinder box waiting to flame up. That said, burn offs are completely natural and part of the cycle of life for woodlands.
Where I used to live people were prohibited from removing built-up fuel near their homes Such deadwood/brush was considered a habitat for some local endangered ground squirrel type critter. Structures and lives were lost as a result, this was decades ago. I'm sure things have gotten no better, probably worse.
... As usual, you should ignore Trump's attempts to somehow blame this on Democrats, saying they weren't "managing" the forests properly ...
Don't let your politics fool you. Science does in fact say we are mismanaging forest and brush lands. Trump may be an idiot but via the broken clock effect he is occasionally correct. In this case our hyper aggressive firefighting over many decades, overseen by both republicans and democrats, has let fuel accumulate. The result has been more and larger fires that are more difficult to contain.
There are many ways to f' up the environment. Some of them are industrial, some of them are well meaning and superficially pro-environment policies. Fires are a natural part of the environmental cycle in some regions. That needs to be recognized and fire suppression needs to start taking that into account.
I used to buy memory chips from him. Wonderful guy full of excitement concerning anything having to do with building your own computer. An information spreader. Serial Good Guy that would help anyone out with tips on DIY, and "where to get it" advice.
Correction: Trump is a fucking evil Forest Gump... Evil Donald Grump.
This was an urban fire; once it hits populated areas, forestry doesn't matter.
My first home computer was an S-100 computer with 2 8" floppy drives, I built from parts in a 5' Sperry-UNIVAC rack in my living room. Had a Hazeltine and 2 Televideo green screen monitors.
;)
Just my 2 cents
The first computer I ever built was on a S100 board. And by "built", I mean wire wrapped by hand from pencil drawn schematics. The S100 standard didn't last all that long but it was one of the first standardized buses for the personal computer age.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
99/4A?!?
No wonder your social life went to zero, even computer nerds avoid that stinky machine!!!
Started personal computing with CP/M and a homebrew S-100, back when I was young enough to spend countless hours trying to get things to work, but old enough to have some income to buy hardware. I even wrote a printer driver in assembler for my CP/M system.
I had a blast with her and learned a lot. Granted, we could never afford the expansion box, or a disk drive (got a nice 4a setup now); but I was still able to figure out plenty with just the base system, cassette recorder, and speech synthesizer.
Also built up my own little library of BASIC programs by borrowing the various TRS-80 books from my school's computer lab and converted many of them from TRS-80 BASIC to TI BASIC.
I do not have any regrets over being a 99er. I was one of the lucky few kids in town to have a computer, and mine was much easier to make say George Carlin's 7 words clearly than any other computer I managed to experience back in the day.
Oh yeah, we also had the best home version of Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator (I am 99% positive that was actually Leonard Nimoy they got to declare "Damage Repaired, Captain!" when you managed to tag a starbase before you could go boom). We also had the 2nd best version of Space Invaders. I do have to grant the #1 spot for that to the VIC-20, which I didn't get to experience until I went through my collect them all phase back in the late 90s.
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And I also have to say that the PEB, the Peripheral Expansion Box just looks so freaking cool and classy; and if they were not still largely unobtanium as they have always been; I would consider getting ahold of a third one to use as a case for a small footprint motherboard Debian/Windows 7 box.
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I was lucky to have been involved in the beginning of the Micro Computer era. I worked for Mt Takayoshi Shiina at SORD Computer of Japan in the early 1980's. I remember talking with Mt Godbout, George Morrow who passed away some time ago from cancer I believe and Mt Shiina as a 20 something starry eyed kid that was totally enthralled with microcomputers and watching the business explode with ideas.
God's speed Mt Godbout!
* Carthago Delenda Est *
He didn't say you said that. He wrote just a single line of text and you still managed to mis-read it. You are not only unpleasant but stupid as well.
I lived vicariously the golden, heroic days of microcomputing via my S-100 computer hobby, and the Godbout cards are some of the nicest, best engineered ones. From everything I read about him, I could deduce that he was a generous, giving and thriving man, a pillar of the home computing community.
He will be missed dearly.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
BYTE magazine would be a good indication. There are online manuals which cover the bus and CPU's:
http://www.s100computers.com/M...
http://www.pestingers.net/page...
Before home computers, if you wanted a computer system, you had to build it yourself as a S-100 rack mounted system. You could buy all sorts of add-on boards (CPU, speech synthesizer, text display video board). Everything was rack mounted. CPU's were beefy for the time: 68030
http://www.s100computers.com/H...
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Thanks for the reference. Looks worth digging up, but might be hard to find around here...
Two of the first PCs I worked on were S-100s, though I didn't have enough money in those days to buy my own. One of them was owned by a residential coop, and the other was at a commercial real estate company. Both of them were pretty massive machines for their day. I think one of them had a gigantic 5- or even 10-MB hard disk. Pretty sure it had 8-inch platters that you could see though a plastic dome. It had a weird motherboard with two CPUs on it, one that ran 8-bit CP/M and a a 16-bit CPU for a 16-bit version that might have been called CP/M-86. Ancient memories, and a bit of a surprise to find out that such a senior creator of those days was still alive.
Rather a sad way to go.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
"Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life."
DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH. ./ I'LL SEE MYSELF OUT.
I can't bear to part with my S100 computers; Vector Graphics and Alpha Micro. I'll take them to my grave. My Alpha Micro colleagues feel the same way. IIRC, at the Atlantic City Computer Festival (August 1976?), I rode the elevator up with Carl Helmers, editor of Byte Magazine. He was excited by a meeting where the various hardware manufactures agreed on a moniker of S100. I also had a conversation with Steve Jobs at his cardtable booth. He claimed to have advanced orders for 600 Apple 1 boards. I thought that was bullshit because no one had that kind of volume. He confided that Apple would soon release an improved model, called Apple 2, that offered color, a completely unique offering. I asked if people really cared about color. Wasn't monochrome just as useful? He assured me people would snatch up there completed-system color computer. I often told this story to illustrate how Steve was so much more attuned to peoples wants than I was. But in 1984, he rolled out the first Macintosh, a monochrome computer -- so much for must-have color computers.
THIS IS A FRIENDLY REMINDER FOR YOUR UPCOMING APPOINTMENT. PLEASE DRESS APPROPRIATELY, IT'S GOING TO BE A LONG WAY DOWN.
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen? Me. I watch him. Always.”
“I'd rather be a rising ape than a falling angel.”
I didn't say he deserved to die in a fire. And only losers like you use 'tard' as an insult.
What? You mean like all the loser Slashtards that call anyone who posts ANYTHING in support of a particular product or computer platform a "fanboi" or a "shill".
Yeah. "Slashtard" fits most perfectly.
(I am 99% positive that was actually Leonard Nimoy they got to declare "Damage Repaired, Captain!" when you managed to tag a starbase before you could go boom)
That Nimoy voice sample was in the arcade version. The TI chip supported custom samples (B-17 Bomber on Intellivision famously had a custom startup voice), so they probably used the same recording. That's also impressive since a lot of home conversions never had access to the original game assets. (ColecoVision games in particular rented an arcade machine as the "reference".) I wouldn't be surprised to find that the arcade version used the TI chip too, since voice samples were enormous back then unless you had that sort of compression.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Well this is another fire in the valley, sort of. Yes, quite sad.
Go molest your daughter some more your flamin douche bag.
You*
"Bill Godbout was one of the earliest and most influential supports of the S-100 bus in the mid-1970s."
Most machines of that time were using little bits of plastic or even metal supports, so he was really thinking outside the box. Or maybe /. needs editors that know how to edit.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
So who died and left you their UID, junior?
rip
Go molest your daughter some more your flamin douche bag.
I am simply blinded by your dazzling wit. ...and not only is it "you", not "your"; but it is also "flamin' ", not "flamin".
As I said...