SWTPC
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SWTPC's logo
SWTPC (Southwest Technical Products Corporation) was a designer and manufacturer of electronic products, many available in kit form, based in San Antonio, Texas, in the US. Until the mid-1970s, most of their kits were intended for audio use (hi-fi and utility amplifiers, test equipment, etc).
When microprocessors (CPU chips) became available, SWTPC became one of the first suppliers of microcomputers to the general public, focusing on designs using the Motorola 6800, and later the 6809, CPUs. Many of these products were available in kit form as well. SWTPC designed and supplied computer terminals, chassis, processor cards, memory cards, motherboards, I/O cards, disk drive systems, tape storage systems,...
SWTPC's SS-50 bus was supported by several other manufacturers (eg, Midwest Scientific Inc, Smoke Signal Broadcasting, Gimix, Helix, Tano, etc) and was even extended to the SS-64 (for the 68000 CPU) by Helix. They even designed one of the first printers available for microcomputer users.
Technical Systems Consultants, first of West Lafayette Indiana (Purdue University) and later of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was the foremost supplier of software for the SWTPC hardware. This included the operating system Flex and various applications. There were many others, for instance Introl, delivering a C compiler and Omegasoft with a Pascal compiler.
External links
- SWTPC product history website (http://www.swtpc.com/) – By Bill Dawson and Michael Holley