Excellent site about systems produced by SAGE Computer/Stride Micro/MicroSage
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Toshi (Germany)
Friday 18th October 2019
I own a running SAGE II as well. I would be very pleased to get in contact with other SAGE owners and I am as well interested in any SAGE soft- and hardware that might be for sale - email " thufir(at) web.de"
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Doctor Smith says: Cackling Cacophony!
Friday 3rd February 2017
Doctor Smith says: Cackling Cacophony! Very fast over priced junk. I prefer Apple II anyday over this Bubble-headed Booby. Version 4
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Jonas Glanshed (Sweden)
Thursday 14th February 2013
took some pictures of my Stride 460 a while ago http://imgur.com/a/jxZtB$0 tape drive´s dead though and the winchester discs have seen better days, so running or reinstalling Unistride is not possible at the moment. pSystem on floppy works fine though.
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Rich Austin (Barnsley, England)
Saturday 15th October 2011
I learnt programming many years ago on a Sage IV. I have been a programmer for years and I still think the ucsd Pascal embedded in the Sage IV was the best language I ever used.\
I loved the Sage even if it did have a tendency to break down quite a lot! We used it for transmitting programs to 4 welding robots. It was connected to an external box which allowed it to produce colour graphics on one of those steel cased monitors you used to see on BBC Micro''s.\
I once wrote a robotics simulation which used the colour screen. It simulated the 4 robots and I had an outline of the machinery on the screen too. Really powerful piece of kit for its time - early to mid eighties.
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Peter F. (Suffolk, UK)
Wednesday 23rd January 2008
Used to use one at work running UCSD Pascal with a hazletyne terminal.
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Bob Needham (Reno, NV)
Tuesday 8th November 2005
I was amaxed to stumble across the SAGE/STRIDE sites. I didn't think anyone cared anymore. It is heartening to hear that some are still running.\
I have quite a bit of old documentation, some software, and schematics for all boards. I will be glad to share copies of anything I have with anyone.\
-Thanks,\
-Bob Needham\
-Co-founder, SAGE Computer Technology
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David W. Erhart (Milpitas, California)
Monday 31st October 2005
It's wonderful to find people familiar with the Sage and Stride systems. I'm building a site to honor those systems: www.sageandstride.org. If you have anything that will add to the site such as documentation, marketing/sales material, software, pictures, stories, etc., please contact me and I'll update the site with the information. Dr. Wigan has already shared many great stories with me and I hope for many more. Thanks, david.
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Marcus Wigan (Australia )
Monday 24th October 2005
Sage 2 and 4. I handled these in Australia for some years and still have 3 sage 4s. I have PDS, HyperForth+, Lispkit Lisp, Modula2(USCSDII), UCSDIV, Idris(unix), cabrideg TRIPOS (including the full symbolic algebra system REDUCE) and Mirage operating systems for them, plus service manuals and full docs plus the entire UCSD P-system library in sage format 5" floppies... I knew the people at Softech and UCSD a little, and Telesoft when they moved on to Ada... and several PLUTO colour boxes to give Sages colour - these were shown at SageFairs in Nevada and came out of England. Would like ot make contact with Birger Blixt as we may be able together to plug any missing holes in support docs...
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Colin Hamilton (UK)
Monday 24th October 2005
I was a self-taught programmer in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the very early 1980s, learning how to program Apple IIs using UCSD Pascal. Sage microcomputers came along and I established my own software company on the strength of them. We made use of Sage II, Sage IV, Stride and then Pinnacle computers. The beauty of the UCSD p-System of course was its portability, and I am still (Oct 2005) maintaining clients with UCSD Pascal systems that are now running on Windows XP and Novell networks.
The Sage IV was a no-compromise extended version of the Sage II.
There were 2 large PC boards in a SAGE IV. The first had the CPU, 2 serial ports, PIO, GPIB, floppy controller, up to 512K DRAM. This board was the same as the main board in the SAGE II. The second board (which set above the first) had 4 more serial ports, hard disk controller, and another 512K DRAM.
The case was slightly taller as it contained the full height hard disk.
The built-in multi-user BIOS, written by Bill Bonham the Sage software guru, allowed the Sage to run several operating systems at once, serving up to 6 serial ports in real time within 1 MB of RAM... in 1983. At this time, PC/Intel based systems used a 8 bit-bus processor running twice slower, and a primitive operating system. So why this Sage system didn't become the standard of the future?
In addition to the P-System delivered with the system, several companies in the world wrote various operating systems (CP/M, Posix, PDos, Tripos, Pluto...) and languages (Fortran, Lisp, Pascal...) for the Sage IV.
Although Sage systems were the fastest personal systems of their days, and were intensively used by scientists and engineers for more than ten years, they are now totally forgotten, and so are all their powerful related OS's and software.
G. Lobay remembers:
Our lab had the Sage II and IV. This company changed its name to Stride Computer and continued operations under that name for a while.
There were more models produced under the Stride name with the same basic architecture - P-system O/S, Motorola processor, dumb terminals. Our lab also had at least two Stride machines. Of course now they are long gone.
More information from Birger Blixt, from Sweden:
I worked for a company that sold stride computers in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and I think, there was nothing more stable in the micro computer range at the time. In Denmark they controlled wind craft generators and was running over 10 years with zero admin, and maybe even zero reboot.
I was one of very few in Sweden that could operate them and partition the hard-drive for unix (UniStride) for the Stride 440, 460. I also repaired the 400,600 series, so Stride Computers sent me all drawings and pal source.
Later they came with SCSI, and the need for PSYS was removed. (stride 640 ,660). The last model in the serie was Stride 740 also sold as SuperStride 740 and Shannon 5000. (I even think they was named Millenium a short period). The 740 model had 48 serial ports, and could easy handle all of them at the same time with 20-30 Office users logged in, a room full of printers that run constantly and so on.
One company in Sweden still use one superstride 740 in production, and I support it for them.
My first unix machine was a stride 440 , so it's very nostalgic things for me.
We need more info about this computer ! If you designed, used, or have more info about this system, please send us pictures or anything you might find useful.
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