Herb Johnson last updated June 20 2011. (c) Herb Johnson 2011
I was contacted in June by Steve Kline a former employee of Dr. John Torode's Digital Micro Systems company in the early 1980's. He described the company in the early 80's and sent some building photos. Here's what he had to say. - Herb
I was checking out your blurb about Digital Micro Systems from Nov 2010 and wanted to give you some additional fodder as I worked for DMS from 1980 until 1984 while John was still running the company.
At the time of my involvement, John and Patty Torode lived on Bay Farm Island in Alameda, Claifornia and John sported a mustache and beard. DMS occupied two offices in Oakland CA in 1979 and one of the offices was located at 4444 Piedmont Ave in Oakland across from the Chapel of the Chimes mortuary & crematorium. The other office was down the street where John and Patty were located. It was a small old building from the 1920's with an attached two car garage and workspace. Some engineering support and purchasing was done in the upstairs offices with the stock room and assembly done downstairs in the garage. All assembly of the computers was done on the premises, no such thing as a clean room out in the garage.
In 1980 we had no more than 15 or 20 employees. [They included a] guy from Russia (Sergio) who built the power supplies, our technician Tim who tested the hard drives and the floppy drives, Ginny who built our various cable assemblies, Joe was our head engineer (who liked to show people his watch that had a built in calculator). Also, Eric Gilliland was in Engineering support, Jack Dawkins was our purchasing manager and [myself] Steve Kline was in manufacturing & parts supply.
[Here's some photos that Steve provided, - Herb
Digital Microsystems 1280 logo from 1984
Digital Microsystems letterhead for 1984 business card is similar.
In early 1982 we consolidated our operations and moved everyone down to 1840 Embarcadero Cove in Oakland CA where we were all under one roof. We actually were selling enough systems at one point that we expanded the manufacturing operations across the street to an old warehouse that used to be a bakery sometime in 1983. When we first moved into the former bakery the amount of flour residue that was still on the ground was incredible. It took us a few months just to clean up the building and get it ready for manufacturing. The bakery/manufacturing building is no longer there as it was eventually torn down and a hotel built on its premises.
Ultimately manufacturing, purchasing and engineering would occupy the bakery building with Sales and the Executive offices still across the street at 1840 Embarcadero. Since this was early in the PC world the equipment although somewhat small was heavy. The cases that held our large CP/M based business computers were built using 1/8" steel and painted beige with anodized black from covers.
[Here's the hardware content of a typical system.] Two eight inch floppies were side by side on the bottom level and a large 14" Winchester hard drive (10 MB) was in a slot on the next level. The floppy controllers and Hard disk controllers were designed in house and their boards were manufactured at a local board shop. The FDC and HDC all used discrete components so the boards were very large about the size of a standard size letter. Those controllers were located side by side on top of the Winchester drive and then a metal plate screwed down to the top. The DMS logo that was adhered to the case was made from metal (no stickers on those systems). The entire computer weighed easy 50 lbs.
We also used 8" wide Fujitsu hard drives in some of our other [non DMS-80?] products. I don't recall the capacity of those drives but they had 4 single sided platters encased in a smokey translucent plastic cover. You could actually watch the heads move back and forth across the platters as they read the data.
The power supplies on our larger computers were built onto a 1/4" thick anodized aluminum backing plate that was bent in the shape of an "L". The supply was open air and not encased in any type of protective enclosure (other than heat shrink tubing on the exposed parts). These units used a large 10lb multi-tap transformer connected to a case mountable full wave rectifier connected to two very large filter capacitors (around 25000 uF) along with the other parts. The supplies were so big and heavy that you could only carry one in each hand.
Some of the models that I remember. The SPX - Serial Port Expander. DMS-80 as I recall was our first 8086 based computer, and the DMS 5000 allowed the monitor to be switched from a full size letter format to a wide screen spreadsheet format. We used a mercury switch on the inside of the monitor to determine what direction the monitor was in. We also had a large "portable" computer that had two metal legs that didn't work very well.
Ironically the office that I now occupy overlooks the old building at 1840 and I can still see where I used to sit on the back loading dock and have lunch with the gang some thirty years ago. The building at 1840 Embarcadero was not very efficient for our vendors as the semi trucks could not turn around easily. Novice drivers would get stuck trying to turn their trucks around. I remember when one of the trucks had to unload his entire shipment of 200 floppy drives in front of the building. A quantity of 200 sounds small but 8" drives with thick Styrofoam packing material takes up a lot of space. We could only carry 6 boxes on a hand truck at one time, it made for a long afternoon.
John must have actually sold the company in 1984 because I remember the meeting when he and Patty told everyone that he had sold DMS to a UK company. I left the company in 1984 to continue my education, but I still have fond memories of my years at Digital Micro Systems. In fact in the late 1980's I was rummaging through the old Quinn's Electronics near the Oakland Airport (a local salvage shop) and came across some of the cable assemblies that Ginny had made back in 1983 with her QA tag still on the assembly.
[Speaking of early computers,] back in 1977 when I was in high school, my electronics teacher, Mr. Cleveland, bought one of the first "personal computers" known as the [Processor Technology] SOL 1 that he built in class. It was text driven and all his students were very impressed. At the same time, our computer club used a Western Union Teletype machine to write programs and play Star Trek on. We would enter coordinates and wait for the teletype to print each line one by one to see where our phasors struck. Too Funny!
Ah the memories.. - Steve Kline
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