Between December 1976 and mid-1985, I was proprietor, partner,
then president of Marinchip Systems, originally a
proprietorship, then a partnership (originally with Fred
Camerer, who did the logic design and printed circuit layout of
our boards, then later with Dan Drake, who took over a large
part of the software development). Later, Marinchip Systems was
incorporated in California as Marinchip Systems, Ltd., which was
a huge mistake as it placed us squarely in the bull's-eye of the
collectivist slavers who rule that sad and dying jurisdiction.
Back then, we were simply trying to revolutionise the personal
computing business by providing, to users of our machines, the
same kind of power they'd have had paying dozens or hundreds of
times more dialing into a timesharing service.
Marinchip Systems developed the first true 16-bit personal computer
for the S-100 bus, based on the Texas Instruments TMS9900 microprocessor.
Our single-board M9900 CPU interfaced the processor to the
S-100 bus, which had originally been designed for the Intel 8080
8-bit microprocessor. It could use either 8-bit S-100 memory and
I/O peripherals, or its own 16-bit wide memory, which ran twice as
fast. (When I say “true” 16-bit, that is to distinguish
the M9900 CPU from the Alpha Microsystems AM-100, which was
a multi-board processor using the Western Digital WD16 chipset.
Although the processor architecture was 16-bit, its access to
memory on the bus was restricted to 8 bits, and hence suffered a
speed penalty.)
Marinchip Systems developed all of the software for the M9900
from scratch. Bundled with the CPU board were the Marinchip Disc
Executive (MDEX), a single-user disc operating system comparable
to CP/M, but more Unix-like in operation, a BASIC interpreter,
assembler, linker, debugger, text editor, NROFF-like text formatter,
disc utility, diagnostics, and a general-purpose subroutine
library including floating point arithmetic and mathematical
functions. Optional software included a port of Per Brinch Hansen's
Sequential Pascal compiler, which compiled to a pseudocode that was
interpreted by a virtual machine engine coded in assembly language,
an Extended Commercial BASIC with 16 digit accuracy, a compiler
writing language called META, and QBASIC, a compiler for the
popular CBASIC-2™ language which generated native machine
code. In 1980, Marinchip introduced NOS/MT, a Unix-like
multi-user operating system which provided each user his own
64 Kb address space and supported large (for the time) hard discs,
background batch jobs, and print spooling. We used QBASIC to port
a series of business applications (General Ledger, Accounts Payable
and Receivable, and Payroll). A screen-oriented text editor, WINDOW,
was implemented in QBASIC.
Marinchip Systems customers developed a variety of software for
the machine, including a FORTH interpreter, a systems programming
language, and a rudimentary computer-aided design system which
provided the inspiration for AutoCAD.
This Web tree is an archive of the Marinchip era. Sadly, little
remains. Back in the day, you couldn't just snap pictures as
you do now: it took film, processing, and then you had to keep
the prints around until somebody could scan them in the distant
future. There are huge gaps in the Marinchip story. If you
have something in your attic that can fill it in, please hit the
“Feedback” button and bung it in.
The following documents are available.
- First Advertisement (1978)
- After introducing the Marinchip 9900 at the Second West
Coast Computer Faire in March, 1978, we announced it to
the wider world in this modest third-page advertisement
in Kilobaud and Byte magazines.
This humble advert recruited many of Marinchip's key
customers and resellers.
- M9900 CPU: New Product Announcement
- Concurrent with the first advertisement for the M9900 CPU,
this new product announcement was sent to all of the personal
computing and electronics magazines, accompanied by a photo
of the circuit board.
- M9900 CPU Brochure (March 1978)
- When the M9900 CPU was introduced at the West Coast Computer
Faire we weren't ready to take orders for the board. This is
the brochure we handed out in our booth, inviting attendees
to join a list to be notified when we began shipping.
- Assemble a Super Business System
- The Marinchip M9900 made the cover of the January, 1981
issue of Kilobaud magazine. Inside, a
nine-page article by Dr. Tom Lukers described assembling
his own custom business system around the M9900, from
building the boards from kits to selecting and
configuring peripherals.
- An Introduction
to the Marinchip Systems M9900 [PDF]
- Duff Kurland was one of the first to install an M9900 system.
In the July/August 1981 issue of 99'er Magazine,
a publication devoted to the ill-fated Texas Instruments
TI-99/4 home computer, he
describes Marinchip hardware and software and his own configuration.
- M9900 Circuit Boards
- Photos of Marinchip M9900 circuit boards, including the
first single-board hand wired prototype.
- Marinchip Systems, Summer 1980
- In the summer of 1980, Rudolf Künzli visited
Marinchip headquarters (my house in Mill Valley,
California), and took photos of the manufacturing and
test area (living room) and development lab (spare
bedroom).
- M9900 System-1
- Sometime in 1980, we got the harebrained idea that there
was a demand for an all-in-one system, and we collaborated
with a local system builder named Bill Sheldon, who had
been assembling our boards on a contract basis, to
design this system, which integrated the M9900 in an
S-100 chassis, two eight inch floppy drives, and a
keyboard and monitor. This is the brochure we put
together when we announced this contraption at the West
Coast Computer Faire. We never sold a single one.
- Marinchip Systems: Questions and Answers
- In October, 2017, I had an E-mail conversation with
Paul Ruizendaal about Marinchip history, hardware, and
software. Here is that conversation, edited for
clarity and to add links where appropriate.
- Before Autodesk
- This isn't strictly a part of this collection, but a
chapter from The Autodesk File
containing a document from September 1981 pondering the
future of Marinchip and those working with it. This was the
last gasp before we decided it was time to try something
different.
- Owens
Associates Brochure [PDF]
- John D. Owens Associates, Inc. of Staten Island, New York, was one
of Marinchip's first dealers and one of the most successful. They
configured custom systems for an international clientele and
collaborated with Marinchip to support new peripherals, often loaning
us hardware to develop drivers. Here is one of their product brochures
in the mature Marinchip era, after we shipped NOS/MT and supported
hard discs. This includes the only known copy of my notorious
“list of difficult questions”, which was typed on my
IBM Selectric typewriter. I have elided decades-old street addresses
and telephone numbers.
- Marinchip Manuals [PDF scans]
-
- Hardware
- Operating Systems
- Programming Languages
- Utilities
- Specification Sheets
