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General Automation

GA General Automation was an American company, founded in 1968 by Larry Goshorn (a former marketing executive and a salesman from Honeywell), which manufactured minicomputers and industrial controllers.

In 1994, General Automation announced it would be relocating from Anaheim to Irvine. It announced it would be phasing-out its manufacturing operations but would retain its 50 employees.

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Products

  • GA SPC-122 (Jan 1968)
  • Priced at $6400 and claiming $4,000 worth of free options
  • Totally integrated, binary, parallel, single-address processor
  • 8-bit data and 12-bit address
  • 4,096 words (8-bit bytes) of memory with a 2.2 microsecond cycle time
  • Shared command concept that permits the SPC-12s 8-bit memory to handle 12-bit instructions.
  • Features included a real-time clock, expandable memory to 16K, a teletype interface, a control panel and a priority interrupt
  • GA SPC-8 (Nov 1968)345
  • GA 18/30 (June 1968, IBM 1800-compatible)6
  • GA SPC-16/30, /50 & /70 (November 1971)7
  • GA SPC-16/40, /45, /65 & /85 (January 1972)8
  • LSI-12/16 (January 1974)9
These computers were initially produced with silicon on sapphire circuit technology provided by Rockwell International1011 but yield problems caused a switch to conventional ICs by 1975.12

References

  1. "General Automation Inc.: The company said Tuesday..." Los Angeles Times. November 30, 1994. Retrieved 5 July 2023. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-11-30-fi-3270-story.html ↩

  2. Datamation, September 1968, p. 137 ↩

  3. "Low Cost Computer Has 4K Memory". Computerworld. 2 (39): 7. 25 Sep 1968. https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=xdtOAAAAIBAJ&pg=3932%2C3357338 ↩

  4. "Across the Editor's Desk - Computing and Data Processing Newsletter: SPC-8, A NEW GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTER FROM GENERAL AUTOMATION, INC". Computers and Automation: 60. Oct 1968. https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_computersA_9801715 ↩

  5. SPC-8 general purpose computer. General Automation, Inc. 1968. https://archive.org/stream/TNM_SPC-8_general_purpose_computer_-_General_Auto_20171108_0094#page/n1/mode/2up ↩

  6. Datamation, May 1969, p. 136 ↩

  7. Datamation, November 15, 1971, p. 112 ↩

  8. Datamation, January 1972, p. 5 ↩

  9. Datamation, January 1974, p. 105 ↩

  10. "Rockwell Cancels SOS uC" (PDF). Microcomputer Digest. 1 (7): 1, 4. January 1975. Retrieved 11 January 2023. http://bitsavers.org/magazines/Microcomputer_Digest/Microcomputer_Digest_v01n07_Jan75.pdf ↩

  11. Datamation, January 1974, p. 105 ↩

  12. Datamation, January 1975, p. 18 ↩

  13. *"Mini Maker Offering Micro". December 6, 1976. Retrieved March 7, 2019. https://books.google.com/books?id=-2ZtoSPs5IEC&dq=general+automation+GA+16/110&pg=PA50 ↩

  14. Olmos, David (August 3, 1988). "Parallel Computer Acquired 16 Months Ago: General Automation to Sell Money-Losing Subsidiary". Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-08-03-fi-6568-story.html ↩