Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Smoke Signal Broadcasting
Smoke Signal Broadcasting, Inc. (SSB), later known as Smoke Signal, was an American computer company founded in 1976 by Frederic Jerome "Ric" Hammond of Hollywood, California. The company earned its reputation by offering expansions for the Southwest Technical Products (SWTPC) 6800 microcomputer. It later manufactured its own line of computers, called the Chieftain. Though it remains little-known, Smoke Signal was an early and important manufacturer of multi-user computer systems.
Hammond, an enthusiast of radio who worked at CBS as a programming director, set out his company to act as a consulting business for broadcast entities but quickly leaned into the computer industry. According to Byte, Smoke Signal Broadcasting was the first third-party company to offer expansions for SWTPC. Their floppy disk drive system expansion and accompanying OS-68 operating system proved such a success that it spurred the development of the Chieftain, itself running OS-68. While later iterations of the Chieftain won praise for technical merit, the refusal to invest in a centralized source of software turned off some customers.
Following the company's poor performance in the mid-1980s, Hammond relegated Smoke Signal Broadcasting to the status of a support line for existing customers before disestablishing it in 1991. He formed another corporation in 1987, this time in the real estate industry, but this proved short-lived after the housing market collapsed in Ventura County. Hammond later revisited his original passion of radio in a couple of professional settings before his death in 2012.
Ric Hammond, graduate of the Thacher School and UC Santa Barbara, founded Smoke Signal Broadcasting in 1976. The company was first headquartered in Hollywood, California. Hammond had been an enthusiast of radio since at least the early 1960s; he was named president of the Thacher School's Amateur Radio Club when it opened up in 1962. During Smoke Signal's founding years, he simultaneously worked as programming director at CBS Radio's KNX-FM station in Los Angeles. He started Smoke Signal as a consulting business for broadcast entities. Hammond maintained a keen interest in computers since the early 1970s, having taken a three-day course at Motorola to learn how to build a computer at the board level, but intended to keep Smoke Signal relevant to his interest in radio. However, after learning about the dearth of memory expansion and peripherals for the SS-50 bus used by the highly popular Southwest Technical Products 6800 microcomputer, Hammond rectified this by designing the M-16-A, a 16 KB static RAM board, marketing it as a Smoke Signal product.
Released in late 1976, according to Byte magazine, the M-16-A was the first expansion board manufactured independent of Southwest Technical Products for the SWTPC 6800. It was an instant success, with Hammond quickly becoming overwhelmed with orders for the board. By 1977, the company had fully shifted its business to offering expansions for the SWTPC. In the next year, they released a 5.25-inch floppy disk drive system, the BFD-68. This system housed up to three drives in one cabinet and came with a controller board to plug into the SS-50 bus of the SWTPC 6800, as well as OS-68, a disk operating system similar to Technical Systems Consultants's FLEX that provided the SWTPC 6800 with a random-access file system.
The BFD-68 also proved popular among users of the SWTPC 6800 and inspired Smoke Signal to release their own microcomputer based on the Motorola 6800 microprocessor in 1978, after having moved to Westlake Village, California. Called the Chieftain, this computer came equipped with a nine-slot motherboard with SS-50 compatibility, 32 KB of RAM—expandable up to 60 KB—two serial ports, either two 5.25-inch or two 8-inch floppy drives, and an 80-by-25 character display.
Smoke Signal aimed the Chieftain at scientific engineers and came included with OS-68. It sold the computer both directly to businesses and through computer retailers. The company offered the Chieftain only as an assembled computer—a somewhat unusual approach when most companies sold their computers as kits to be assembled by the end user, who were usually hobbyists. Hammond felt that this approach would both serve as a value-add for hobbyists and would make it appealing to the non-hobbyist buyer. The Chieftain's use of a cooling fan and gold-plated edge connectors for reliability was also relatively novel for 6800-based computers, as noted by Personal Computing magazine. The Chieftain's case bore a faux-leather finish, according to technologist Bill von Hagen, in keeping with Smoke Signal's Native American corporate identity. The computer soon found commercial buyers among Hughes Aircraft and Western Electric, who used it for industrial process control. Computer journalist and collector Michael Nadeau called the Chieftain one of the best SWTPC-based computers ever made.
Smoke Signal released a single-board computer a year after the Chieftain, called the SCB-68. It featured the same 6800 processor as the Chieftain but only 1 KB of scratch-pad RAM and 2 KB of EPROM standard. Users could add 18 KB worth of additional EPROMs as well as a math co-processor, a real-time clock, and serial ports. The company adopted design elements of the SS-50 bus for this single-board computer.
Hub AI
Smoke Signal Broadcasting AI simulator
(@Smoke Signal Broadcasting_simulator)
Smoke Signal Broadcasting
Smoke Signal Broadcasting, Inc. (SSB), later known as Smoke Signal, was an American computer company founded in 1976 by Frederic Jerome "Ric" Hammond of Hollywood, California. The company earned its reputation by offering expansions for the Southwest Technical Products (SWTPC) 6800 microcomputer. It later manufactured its own line of computers, called the Chieftain. Though it remains little-known, Smoke Signal was an early and important manufacturer of multi-user computer systems.
Hammond, an enthusiast of radio who worked at CBS as a programming director, set out his company to act as a consulting business for broadcast entities but quickly leaned into the computer industry. According to Byte, Smoke Signal Broadcasting was the first third-party company to offer expansions for SWTPC. Their floppy disk drive system expansion and accompanying OS-68 operating system proved such a success that it spurred the development of the Chieftain, itself running OS-68. While later iterations of the Chieftain won praise for technical merit, the refusal to invest in a centralized source of software turned off some customers.
Following the company's poor performance in the mid-1980s, Hammond relegated Smoke Signal Broadcasting to the status of a support line for existing customers before disestablishing it in 1991. He formed another corporation in 1987, this time in the real estate industry, but this proved short-lived after the housing market collapsed in Ventura County. Hammond later revisited his original passion of radio in a couple of professional settings before his death in 2012.
Ric Hammond, graduate of the Thacher School and UC Santa Barbara, founded Smoke Signal Broadcasting in 1976. The company was first headquartered in Hollywood, California. Hammond had been an enthusiast of radio since at least the early 1960s; he was named president of the Thacher School's Amateur Radio Club when it opened up in 1962. During Smoke Signal's founding years, he simultaneously worked as programming director at CBS Radio's KNX-FM station in Los Angeles. He started Smoke Signal as a consulting business for broadcast entities. Hammond maintained a keen interest in computers since the early 1970s, having taken a three-day course at Motorola to learn how to build a computer at the board level, but intended to keep Smoke Signal relevant to his interest in radio. However, after learning about the dearth of memory expansion and peripherals for the SS-50 bus used by the highly popular Southwest Technical Products 6800 microcomputer, Hammond rectified this by designing the M-16-A, a 16 KB static RAM board, marketing it as a Smoke Signal product.
Released in late 1976, according to Byte magazine, the M-16-A was the first expansion board manufactured independent of Southwest Technical Products for the SWTPC 6800. It was an instant success, with Hammond quickly becoming overwhelmed with orders for the board. By 1977, the company had fully shifted its business to offering expansions for the SWTPC. In the next year, they released a 5.25-inch floppy disk drive system, the BFD-68. This system housed up to three drives in one cabinet and came with a controller board to plug into the SS-50 bus of the SWTPC 6800, as well as OS-68, a disk operating system similar to Technical Systems Consultants's FLEX that provided the SWTPC 6800 with a random-access file system.
The BFD-68 also proved popular among users of the SWTPC 6800 and inspired Smoke Signal to release their own microcomputer based on the Motorola 6800 microprocessor in 1978, after having moved to Westlake Village, California. Called the Chieftain, this computer came equipped with a nine-slot motherboard with SS-50 compatibility, 32 KB of RAM—expandable up to 60 KB—two serial ports, either two 5.25-inch or two 8-inch floppy drives, and an 80-by-25 character display.
Smoke Signal aimed the Chieftain at scientific engineers and came included with OS-68. It sold the computer both directly to businesses and through computer retailers. The company offered the Chieftain only as an assembled computer—a somewhat unusual approach when most companies sold their computers as kits to be assembled by the end user, who were usually hobbyists. Hammond felt that this approach would both serve as a value-add for hobbyists and would make it appealing to the non-hobbyist buyer. The Chieftain's use of a cooling fan and gold-plated edge connectors for reliability was also relatively novel for 6800-based computers, as noted by Personal Computing magazine. The Chieftain's case bore a faux-leather finish, according to technologist Bill von Hagen, in keeping with Smoke Signal's Native American corporate identity. The computer soon found commercial buyers among Hughes Aircraft and Western Electric, who used it for industrial process control. Computer journalist and collector Michael Nadeau called the Chieftain one of the best SWTPC-based computers ever made.
Smoke Signal released a single-board computer a year after the Chieftain, called the SCB-68. It featured the same 6800 processor as the Chieftain but only 1 KB of scratch-pad RAM and 2 KB of EPROM standard. Users could add 18 KB worth of additional EPROMs as well as a math co-processor, a real-time clock, and serial ports. The company adopted design elements of the SS-50 bus for this single-board computer.