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Bill Godbout, a legend in the S-100 community for his 1970s-1980s work at Godbout Electronics and CompuPro, perished November 8 due to the Camp wildfire in Concow, California. He was 79.
There is a family-led GoFundMe campaign to support their needs in this difficult time.
Godbout was an important advocate for the industry-standard S-100 bus in its early days, as well as being a parts supplier for electronic music projects, according to 1970s microcomputing expert Herb Johnson.
Godbout was born October 2, 1939. He talked about his introduction to computing in an interview with InfoWorld magazine for their February 18, 1980 issue. "My first job out of college was with IBM. I served a big-system apprenticeship there, but I think the thing that really triggered [my interest] was the introduction of the 8008 by Intel," he said. "I was fascinated that you could have that kind of capability in a little 18-pin package."
Steven Levy, in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, wrote about Godbout's Silicon Valley electronics business. "Bill Godbout... bought junk on a more massive scale — usually government surplus chips and parts which were rejected as not meeting the exacting standards required for a specific function, but perfectly acceptable for other uses. Godbout, a gruff, beefy, still-active pilot who hinted at a past loaded with international espionage and intrigues for government agencies whose names he could not legally utter, would take these parts, throw his own brand name on them, and sell them, often in logic circuitry kits that you could buy by mail order."
Does anyone else remember the days of the S-100 Bus? One of my first jobs actually entailed using an Altair 8800 on which the S-100 bus was based. Though I had no personal connection with him, I recall often seeing his name mentioned in the various articles I read.
One of the long-Long timers has passed. R.I.P.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @01:55PM
> I recall often seeing his name mentioned in the various articles I read.
Same here, his ads were in the early micro computer magazines too.
We had an S-100 bus computer in the early 1980s. It was originally assembled as a port-concentrator to sit in front of a VAX. I guess that use didn't work out and it was given to us to use for our subcontract work. Had two 8" floppy drives, iirc 600KB each, these spun continuously which meant that access time (for typical small files of the day) was perfectly acceptable. Also had several 4-port serial cards sitting on the S-100 bus...
Ran CP/M, we used it with an Ann Arbor terminal that had a full page text mode (60 lines), great for writing documentation.
With a 1200 baud external modem (and an account on that VAX) we were good to go!