yann64andClaude Opus 5.5
de19014649
228 files were never archived; see docs/not-recovered.md in the extraction repo. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YDRjtmAiNpo5mK5N3d7QwZ
193 lines
17 KiB
Markdown
193 lines
17 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: FORTUNE 32:16
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categories:
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- Computers
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types:
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- Professional Computer
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origins:
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- United Kingdom
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years:
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- '1982'
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cpus:
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- Motorola 68000
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params:
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name: '32:16'
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image: /media/museum/photos/fortune_3216_system_1.jpg
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company: /companies/fortune
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company_name: FORTUNE
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specs:
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- label: NAME
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value: '32:16'
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- label: MANUFACTURER
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value: Fortune
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- label: TYPE
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value: Professional Computer
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- label: ORIGIN
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value: United Kingdom
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- label: YEAR
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value: '1982'
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- label: BUILT IN LANGUAGE
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value: None
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- label: KEYBOARD
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value: Full-stroke 99 keys with numeric keypad and 16 function keys
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- label: CPU
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value: Motorola 68000
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- label: SPEED
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value: 6 Mhz
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- label: RAM
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value: from 256 KB, to 2 MB (4 x 256 KB + 1 MB)
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- label: ROM
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value: unknown
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- label: TEXT MODES
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value: 80 chars. x 24 lines
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- label: GRAPHIC MODES
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value: optional High resolution graphic card
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- label: COLORS
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value: Monochrome
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- label: SOUND
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value: Beeper
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- label: SIZE / WEIGHT
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value: 'Total system weight : 24 Kgs'
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- label: I/O PORTS
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value: External hard-disk unit, Serial RS232 (up to 16), monochrome display
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- label: BUILT IN MEDIA
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value: One or two 5''1/4 800 KB FDD - Hard disk from 5 to 70 MB - optional tape unit
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- label: OS
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value: Berkeley BSD 4.1 Unix
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- label: POWER SUPPLY
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value: Built-in power supply unit
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- label: PERIPHERALS
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value: External hard disk, cartridge tape,
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- label: PRICE
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value: from $5000 to about $15000 according to hardware configuration
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tabs:
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- adverts
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adverts:
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- title: UK ADVERT, OCT. 1983
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subtitle: ''
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text: ''
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image: /media/museum/pubs/fortune_3216_pub_s1.jpg
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comments:
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- author: Lance Norskog (USA)
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date: Friday 13rd May 2022
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text: I did the boot ROM and some kernel bits, 1982 to 1984. We shipped a pretty computer, and then 1.5 years later shipped a computer that actually worked. My first corporate job, and certainly a lot of fun.
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- author: Oscar Hasten (United States)
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date: Friday 24th September 2021
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text: We at the Byte Shop Seattle got a unit to evaluate. Right away I thought it was a fine machine but not something that would fit into our direction selling more consumer machines than anything else. We were an Alpha Micro and Northstar dealer and rarely sold either of them.
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- author: Mike Friese
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date: Tuesday 13rd April 2021
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text: I worked for Western Digital (WD), the company that supplied the disk controller for the on the Fortune 32:16. I designed the parallel section and firmware for the hard disk controller. Fortune’s controller was based on the WD’s WD1001 ECC disc controller that was intended for Seagate ST506 drives. It was based on five 20-pin WD-designed gate arrays and the Signetics 8X305 processor. The 8X305 was a special beast. It could execute instructions 3x faster than the Fortune 32:16’s native 68000 processor. But the 8X305 only had EIGHT instructions. Its speed allowed me to read 5Mbits/sec parallelized data off the disc and make real time decisions on that data. It also allowed me to implement the WD1001’s eight virtual host-facing registers in software. Since the Fortune 32:16 was all about performance, the disk controller needed to implement DMA. DMA controllers of the era typically handled only 8 bit data and 16 bit addressing. The 32:16 bus had 16 bit data and 24 bit addressing.
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I came up with a DMA solution that required no LSI devices nor counters. I had the 8X305 run the 24 bit counters and 8-to-16 bit bus conversion in software. The 8X300 would send addresses and data to simple, cheap octal latches. The Fortune engineers did not like this software solution because they perceived it as slow. Yet, in their own DMA specification, they required devices to not hog bus bandwidth. I demonstrated that the 8×305 software solution met both Fortune’s performance and non-bus hogging goals. The software loop required to update 16 bits of data, update the least significant byte of the address, maintain a word counter, initiate the DMA state machine, and wait for completion was only 8 8X305 instructions or 2 microseconds (us). The required 256 16-bit word DMA transfer could happen in just 512 uS. The sector time of the disk drive was about 1000 us. So my software DMA could deliver data to/from memory at full disc speed. (DMA transfers that crossed 8 bit and 16 bit
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boundaries took 2.75 us and 3.25 us, respectively.)
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- author: Tony Piacente (United States)
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date: Friday 22nd June 2018
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text: I worked for Fortune Systems Corp. in the early 80''s as a Systems Engineer, afterwards becoming their largest distributor and reseller in the U.S. as UniSoft, Inc. and later UniConcepts Corp. in the Denver, CO area. What a fun ride that was! I can still troubleshoot any of the hardware or For:Pro (Unix) issues to this day. What made our company so valuable was our expertise with BAS software. Please feel free to reach out on this topic vtonyp77@yahoho.com
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- author: Hoth (San Jose, Ca, USA)
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date: Sunday 8th February 2015
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text: Wow, what a blast from the past. My father, "the heavy accented Hungarian", worked at Fortune as a Director or Manager when I was in high school in the mid 80''s. We had a computer which I typed many school essays, played Rogue and Star Trek on the UNIX platform. Learned a lot and my neighbor had an Atatri 400 where I learned BASIC. My father worked many long hours, frequently coming home past 8:00$ he was very upset when it folded and alluded that someone high up stole funds and drove it into the ground. Wild coming across this site.
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- author: John Powell (Usa)
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date: Monday 19th November 2012
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text: I worked at Fortune in the early ''80s. it was a wild place to work, very challenging. I was in the board test department and thought it would always be about the hardware and didn''t pay much attention to the software. I guess that''s why I''m still working for a living!
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- author: Trish Millines (USA)
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date: Tuesday 17th August 2010
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text: I worked for Fortune Systems from 1983 to 1985. Worked in the testing group. The machine was certainly ahead of its time.
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- author: Kim (USA)
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date: Friday 6th August 2010
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text: I was a contractor for Fortune Systems, translating error messages, usage messages, man pages, and the newest trend, menus, into German. They let me have one to use, so that''s how I learned Unix, setting up and administering a desktop server and learning what not to do by means of the thousands of error messages I translated. That was one cool machine.
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- author: Chris May (US)
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date: Thursday 10th February 2011
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text: |-
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My forward-looking parents bought a Fortune 32:!6 in 1983 to run their small business. I was 18 years old and became their system manager, and also did some custom programming for them in Informix and Business BASIC. We also got good use out of For:Word, which was really advanced WP software for its time. I put together a pretty good little system for them that they used for years.
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I think one of the scheduling programs I wrote in BASIC was in use until about 1994, when we could no longer get service and finally had to replace it with a custom 4D app running on a Mac.
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I recall buying a 20MB hard disk for about $5,000, and an extra dumb terminal for something like $2000. The whole shebang cost over $15,000, which was serious coin in those days. But we got our money''s worth out of it, and I learned C and Unix along with Informix. Very useful skills at the time, and I am still benefitting from my Unix command line knowledge on my luscious new MacBook.
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I still have the computer and a bunch of accessories and software. It hasn''t been started in at least 15 years.
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- author: Lars Brandewie (USA)
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date: Sunday 22nd November 2020
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text: A hundred years ago I did some test coding on one of these things. A guy had asked me to analyze whether it was fast enough to operate a congressional office system with. I was able to determine that it was by writing code in C. The machine was well ahead of its time, no question.
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- author: Martin How (United Kingdom)
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date: Tuesday 5th February 2019
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text: |-
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I bought one of these in 1983/4 to replace an IBM 5110. It was my first UNIX experience. I learned to program in C using Informix and the C integration library to batch process and add event code it Perfrom forms. We had a 40Mb disk and an extra SCSI disk and expansion cabinet with a serial port expander for 8 people. PSUs were a bit flakey with the caps blowing up, but we quickly learned to pull the plug at the first sound of fizzing on start up.
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We replaced it in 1989 with an Acer Altos running SCO System. Mostly the business runs MS but we still run some UNIX today.
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For fun i now programme and build hardware for the raspberry Pi still using to old skills gained on the Fortune 32:16
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- author: Tom Brown (Denver, CO)
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date: Tuesday 23rd January 2018
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text: I went to a "computer" show in Atlanta in the early 80s and was looking to buy something to help with word processing and accounting in a small tour business. An IBM Selectric typewriter was the hot ticket then. I was about to buy a Vector Graphics C/PM system when I saw the Fortune 32:26 and thought it was awesome. I didn''t even know the difference between hardware and software! We bought a 32:16 (later adding two more terminals) and used it for many years. We also got a relational database package called Rubix, and it was great! I learned Unix and Shell script programming and eventually built quite an extensive reservations and accounting system. This was about the time the Apple IIc came out and I thought that was useless junk. What did I know?
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- author: Tom Brown (Denver, CO)
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date: Tuesday 23rd January 2018
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text: Greg, are you offering to sell your system? If so, how much? I''d love to pound the keys on a 32:26 again.
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- author: Steve (United States)
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date: Monday 24th April 2017
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text: |-
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This was the first Unix system I ever worked with. I found it in a lab at my University and started teaching myself Unix.
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The school saw what I was doing on my own time and hired me as a system administrator for their new Sun-2 as a freshman.
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My how time has flown. Most people have forgotten all about the Fortune if they ever knew about it at all.
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- author: Rick (Washington DC)
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date: Tuesday 21st June 2016
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text: I worked for a Fortune reseller in Alexandria, VA installing and servicing 32:16''s all over the DC/VA/MD area in 1985-86. I loved these computers! Very reliable and perfect for small-medium businesses. I had never touched a UNIX OS and learned it on these machines. Wish I had the chance to work on one of them again for old times sake.
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- author: James Bertsch (United States)
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date: Sunday 10th April 2016
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text: |-
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I was a software developer for a fledgling Value Added Reseller of Fortune Computers. I taught myself Unix and C. I wrote applications, which read EDI Orders sent over a modem from GM, Ford and Chrysler to suppliers.\
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The documents, were then printed for the suppliers so they could fill the orders.
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- author: Oscar (San Diego, CA)
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date: Tuesday 13rd March 2012
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text: I was sales manager for the Byte Shop NorthWest in the early 80''s and we were selling Apple, Atari and IBM mostly at the time. We checked out a Fortune 32:16 to decide whether to add it to our mix but decided against it.
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- author: Chuck (USA)
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date: Thursday 13rd October 2011
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text: |-
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I believe that Fortune set up manufacturing in an old Pepsi bottling plant in San Carlos or Redwood City.
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The software people in Fortune had an almost incestuous relationship with the people at Sun. Certainly Bill Joy had a definite presence at both places.
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I did some contract programming for them around 1981 or so$ I still have the prototype of one of their terminals.
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- author: Allen Grabert
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date: Friday 10th June 2011
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text: I was a year out of college in 1983 when I began working for Bunker Ramo, providing support on a project they had at the time to create a banking software system based on the Fortune 32:16 and a proprietary LAN. They also wanted to be a general reseller of the machine, so one of my ongoing support tasks was to modify Fortune''s software products to change any references to Fortune to equivalent references to Bunker Ramo. Because this was time-consuming, my boss let me take one of these machines home$ while the conversion script was running in the background, I was playing "rogue"! However, just over a year after I started, Bunker Ramo apparently decided that they didn''t want to be a reseller, so I was moved into one of their programming groups.
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- author: Robert Oppenheim (Texas, USA)
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date: Saturday 4th September 2010
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text: Back in the early 1980''s I worked for a small agency whose owner had some big ideas that her Apple II couldn''t handle. She sent me to shop for "the computer that will take us into the future". Needless to say, the emerging office PC market (hardware and software) had limited choices back then. But when I saw and tested the Fortune 32:16, I knew this was what we needed. It came with Informix and Fortune:Word and Multiplan as well as an accounting package. The real dilemma at the time was whether to get the 10 or the 20 MB hard drive. We got the 20 and wondered how we would ever fill it up. Everything I learned about Unix and RDBMS, I learned first on this machine. Seeing these photos and reading others'' similar sentiments makes me remember fondly about the good old days when today''s madness all got started.
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- author: Eric Hammond (USA)
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date: Tuesday 18th August 2009
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text: I learned Unix in 1985 on a Fortune 32:16 as a contractor to Proctor and Gamble, Cincinnati, Ohio. I had been hired to administer and program it as a summer job. I picked up the manual and read it cover to cover, twice. It turns out that the "manual" was a hardcopy of all of the manpages in alphabetical order by command name, so the first time through I was missing some concepts that made more sense the second time through. If I recall correctly, the documentation came in the form of two 3-ring binders.
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- author: Chris Elliott (Leicester, UK)
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date: Sunday 23rd March 2008
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text: |-
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30 meg HD, 3/4 meg RAM - 8 users!
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Informix Database, Fortune:Word & Spreadsheet
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Marvellous.
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Also the most honest manual entry I've ever seen.
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Error XYZ - "If you get this, the main eprom has shuffelled off this mortal coil"
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- author: Karen (USA)
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date: Saturday 8th December 2007
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text: Good old Fortune. Their systems were quite the thing back in my day of selling multiuser systems. One thing about the Fortunes (at least our experience), was that they never, never went down. One solid reliable system. I still have one that I haven't touched in years. My guess is that if I dusted the old thing off and plugged it in, it would fire up.
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- author: Greg Mote (Los Angeles, CA, USA)
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date: Sunday 19th June 2005
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text: I have a 32:16 with a bad power supply. It has been in my dad's garage for years. Anyone interested in it?
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oc_id: 767
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source:
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url: https://web.archive.org/web/20230531225206/http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=767
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date: '2023-05-31'
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---
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When the 32:16 was launched, Fortune Systems Corp. advertised that it was the first integrated Unix-based system for $5000. Actually, the cheaper version was a single floppy disc, single user system that was never sold. A practical small business multiuser configuation, called System 10, and including a 10 MB hard disk and 512 KB of RAM costed about $9000.
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The system could support up to 4 four-port serial terminal controllers and several other peripheral controllers: storage modules, Parallel interfaces, high resolution graphic board and Ethernet network board. The keyboard was a close cousin of the Wang word-processing system one. Keys was well arranged and color coded. The system came with different hard-disk storage options, 5, 10, 20 or even 70 MB on latest models.
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The Fortune 32:16 was a true multiuser multitasking Unix based system offering services that was a length ahead over CP/M's. However, both Unix and Fortune was new to most of the dealers and users. Fortune offered them training courses in hardware, operating system and application software.
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A wide range of high quality business application software was available, as well as programming languages, like a very extended BASIC able to convert code written in other BASICs (AppleSoft, MBASIC, CBASIC, TRS-80 BASIC), PASCAL, FORTRAN 77, COBOL and, of course, C language.
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The 32:16 was also built and sold in France by Thomson under the name of [Micromega 32](/museum/thomson-micromega-32/)
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