Bill Godbout, Early S-100 Bus Pioneer, Perished In the Camp Wildfire (vcfed.org) 124
evanak writes: Bill Godbout was one of the earliest and most influential supports of the S-100 bus in the mid-1970s. He passed away last week due to the Camp wildfire in Concow, California, according to a Vintage Computer Federation blog post. More than 50 other people also died in the fires, but chances are Mr. Godbout was the only one with a license to fly blimps. "Godbout was born October 2, 1939," the blog post reads. "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.'"
Godbout's family has set up a GoFundMe campaign to support their needs in this difficult time.
Godbout's family has set up a GoFundMe campaign to support their needs in this difficult time.
Donate... but carefully! (Score:5, Informative)
By all means, donate what you can to help the CA fire victims. Most donation centers are now saying they have enough of many supplies (clothing, etc, are just piling up), and they mostly need money now, which can be converted into whatever the most urgent local needs are.
However, be careful: there have been a number of "disaster scammers" setting up fake donation sites and absconding with the money. So donate via reputable organizations, or do your due diligence to verify what you are donating to.
But do donate! A whole city was wiped off the map. 71 confirmed deaths so far, with over 1000 missing and many of the missing being elderly people who could not quickly evac and probably burned to death. Firefighters are finding charred remains huddled in cars. Tens of thousands have lost their homes, their pets, and the very fabric of their lives.
It's really bad. So go donate. Just use some common sense in the process.
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You are simply misinformed. While forest management is a contentious issue in California it did not play a significant role in the Tubbs fire that wiped out part of Santa Rosa or the Camp Fire that erased Paradise.
Years of drought, 200 days since the last rain, hurricane force winds, and improper brush clearing by PG&E around power lines are all significant factors in these fires.
The only kind of management you could do is remove the forests entirely and replace them with sand or concrete. The forest
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There has been shitty forest management and it is in part responsible for California's wildfire problem. However, Trump blaming the California state government is disingenuous at best. The biggest practicer of bad forest management in California is the federal government. They supervise most of the forests in California.
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Where do you think the Feds get their money genius?
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You're about as smart as your smart quotes.
A rock star of the Microcomputer Revolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Godbout dates from the wild west days of personal computers. It was a bottom up phenomenon, driven by legions of hackers who passed knowledge through users groups, 73 Magazine, self-published mimeographed "books". In the early days, a 300 baud modem and a real keyboard were a dream. An old Model 33 ASR TTY meant you had hit the "big time". Corporate American hadn't a clue. The personal microcomputer revolution happened under the radar in garages, basements, and bedrooms. Godbout was there front and center, and anyone who was there in those days knows him, or about him, or did business with him.
Rest in peace, old timer.
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The problem is the hardware is so complex now. All that logic in CPU's,GPU's, bus protocols, is usually patented protected, cross-licensed, NDA, DRM and DMCA restricted, Sometimes the driver code is actually used to prevent combinations of hardware settings that work but aren't licensed, aren't in the specification or are going to be patented in future. It takes teams of 200+ developers to get all the device driver software for a GPU: Windows/Android/Linux window system support + actual hardware.
Linux is th
Very Sad News. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Very Sad News. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re. the fire's name [msn.com]:
Butte County's deadly Camp Fire was named after Camp Creek Road, the location where the fire started.
Wildfires are often named after their places of origin. For example, last year's deadly Tubbs Fire was named after Tubbs Lane in Santa Rosa.
One of the true Open Source Founders (Score:5, Interesting)
I only talked to Bill through mail when I was in University - I was building an S-100 Z-80 CPM system and needed some suggestions on how to architect the video driver. Bill pointed me to some reference drawings on the MOT 6845 (same as the original IBM PC) that I could use along with providing me with some software to go with it. The only thing he asked of me was that I pass along the information to anybody who asked.
We lost touch after I got my system working and I always wondered what happened to him.
RIP. He showed me the value of Open Source.
Re:One of the true Open Source Founders (Score:4, Insightful)
I only talked to Bill through mail when I was in University - I was building an S-100 Z-80 CPM system and needed some suggestions on how to architect the video driver. Bill pointed me to some reference drawings on the MOT 6845 (same as the original IBM PC) that I could use along with providing me with some software to go with it. The only thing he asked of me was that I pass along the information to anybody who asked.
We lost touch after I got my system working and I always wondered what happened to him.
RIP. He showed me the value of Open Source.
I am Bills daughter in law, and the whole family appreciates you taking the time to post some kind words. You were lucky to have had Bill touch your life in some way, everybody who met him were better for it, he will be missed greatly. I thank you again for your taking the time to acknowledge a great man, Bill Godbout R.I.P
Re: You live in the richest country ever.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Rich countries get that way by allowing successful people to keep and reinvest their earnings. Places where all the wealth is drained off to 'the people' always end in failure. A recent example is Venezuela.
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Nevertheless, America give more to charity per capita than anyone else. Successful people may also enjoy charity, and the evidence is that they do.
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How much does the American government owe? How about the various State governments?
Every tax cut that involves borrowing more money is a subsidy to the people and industries of the country, which is one of the reasons behind the success of America, debt.
The main difference between America and Venezuela is that America has the petrol dollar and being the current main reserve currency which allows them to spread the inflation caused by printing money over most of the worlds population, while Venezuela is just
RIP & HCF (Score:2)
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The HCF reference outs you as an old-timer.
And my saying that outs me as an old-timer.
Re:RIP & HCF (Score:4, Informative)
It’s a legendary assembly-language instruction - Halt and Catch Fire.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
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I've been looking for real word examples of an HCF. So far the two I've come up with are certain old video screens that could accept a signal which would concentrate the beam on a single spot, and some IBM chain printers that apparently could start a fire if there was a paper jam and they didn't stop.
I imagine some industrial systems could go boom if not shut down properly, but I'm thinking of stuff that wasn't considered in the design but which could happen with a single (or very few) bad instructions.
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Halt and Catch Fire. I'll leave it up to you to google the rest.
Why did so many people die in this fire? (Score:1)
Did the authorities screw up and not tell people to leave? Did people not leave? Were people unable to leave?
The stories all cover the amount of people dead or missing, but there seems to be no coverage as to the why.
Re: Why did so many people die in this fire? (Score:2, Insightful)
They weren't culling deadwood and managing the forest around their town. All the dead wood and brush is/was a tinder box waiting to flame up. That said, burn offs are completely natural and part of the cycle of life for woodlands.
Not necessarily allowed to remove fuel near homes (Score:2, Insightful)
They weren't culling deadwood and managing the forest around their town. All the dead wood and brush is/was a tinder box waiting to flame up. That said, burn offs are completely natural and part of the cycle of life for woodlands.
Where I used to live people were prohibited from removing built-up fuel near their homes Such deadwood/brush was considered a habitat for some local endangered ground squirrel type critter. Structures and lives were lost as a result, this was decades ago. I'm sure things have gotten no better, probably worse.
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Name another year in recorded history where there was zero rain in Paradise into November. Burn offs are completely natural... in the summer, but in a typical year they've had about 8 inches of rain already by November.
Forest management could certainly be better, the national forest service needs to improve. Might help if any significant fraction of California's forests were under state control instead of ruled from 3000 miles away. But they do prescribed burns every spring to try to clear out brush, I can
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Fire don't slow down when the roads get congested and grind to a halt.
Re:Why did so many people die in this fire? (Score:5, Informative)
The fire moved *extremely* quickly. Winds up to 50mph (80km/h), and it's been a very dry summer and fall so things caught fire fast. 20,000 acres were ablaze within twelve hours, and it only spread from there.
AFAICT most of the casualties so far were people caught in their cars while evacuating. Lots of people got encircled by fire, no way out but through. Others were trapped in traffic and the fire caught up.
(As usual, you should ignore Trump's attempts to somehow blame this on Democrats, saying they weren't "managing" the forests properly. This is both incorrect - better forestry would at best have slowed the fire's spread by a small amount - and improper - most of the forests affected are on federal land. Weather conditions were so ripe for a wildfire that the power company considered shutting off power, since wind blowing down power lines can ignite fires. This wasn't done (shutting power off is itself dangerous to the public), and a downed power line is now the primary suspect for the immediate cause of the fire.)
Actually science say we do mismanage (Score:3, Interesting)
... As usual, you should ignore Trump's attempts to somehow blame this on Democrats, saying they weren't "managing" the forests properly ...
Don't let your politics fool you. Science does in fact say we are mismanaging forest and brush lands. Trump may be an idiot but via the broken clock effect he is occasionally correct. In this case our hyper aggressive firefighting over many decades, overseen by both republicans and democrats, has let fuel accumulate. The result has been more and larger fires that are more difficult to contain.
There are many ways to f' up the environment. Some of them are industrial, some of them are well meaning and sup
Re:Actually science say we do mismanage (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not entirely wrong, but not entirely right either.
Controlled burns just aren't possible in every part of the country. Nobody's going to let their house burn down to prevent theoretical worse fires further down the line. You can let acres of grassland or pasture burn, or remote forests - but not woods that are laced with homes.
It's also questionable whether that would even have helped. Accumulated fuel can make fires spread fast, and probably contributed here, but there was also plenty of dry grass due to aforementioned dry summer. And what was the natural rate of fires, pre-humans? My reading claims it's been ten years since a fire swept through the affected area, which doesn't seem particularly long for any specific location. I really doubt every part of the forest burned every single year, ten thousand years ago.
There are clearly improvements we need to make. But I don't think your suggestions (which seem based on Great Plains policies) are the right ones for North California.
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The problem is, these are fairly low income types of places. If you have trailer parks in the woods, they're going to burn. If you have retirement villages, they're going to burn.
Rich people's estates on the same type of land will have some fire protection; fire breaks, sprinkler systems that can wet down an area and slow the spread of the fire; this lowers the fire intensity in the immediate area, even though it doesn't stop the fire. This, combined with rooftop sprinklers, can save buildings.
There isn't e
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The problem is, these are fairly low income types of places. If you have trailer parks in the woods, they're going to burn. If you have retirement villages, they're going to burn.
No, the problem is that people have all sorts of kindling around and on their domiciles:
* https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Education/By-topic/Wildfire/Preparing-homes-for-wildfire
* https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Education/By-topic/Wildfire
If you have pine needles on your roof, and an ember makes contact, they will ignite regardless of how rich or poor you are. Get rid of kindling between 0-6 feet (0-2m) around your house, clear back large vegetation between 0-30' (0-10m), and thin out trees (though clear cutting is
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Yes 10 years is not very long but its not about one particular area
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A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
https://www.theguardian.com/us... [theguardian.com]
"Trump probably has in mind how a century of putting out wildfires in the American west has caused forests to grow dense with trees, making large, hot fires more common than they once were. This is not the predominant cause, however, of the fires currently making the news. To comprehend what is currently taking place in California, you have to comprehend how it has historically burned – and the vast changes now occurring across t
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There's a few things going into creating more favorable conditions for fires.
The amount of beetle die off is increasing much faster then can be managed. Beetle killed trees, usually pines, burn really well. It is really hard to manage large areas of beetle killed trees. The beetles are worse as winters are not cold enough to kill them off.
Springs are happening earlier, causing much more undergrowth, which then dries out and becomes potential fuel. You'd have to burn everything yearly, which is not practical
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Science does in fact say we are mismanaging forest and brush lands.
Yes, but the mismanaged forest is FEDERAL, not State owned. Meaning Trump is blaming the California state government for his own failure.
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There is no shortage of mismanagement at the state and local levels, it is not a problem specific to the federal level.
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That would still be Trump trying to pass his share of the blame to the state of California at best.
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That would still be Trump trying to pass his share of the blame to the state of California at best.
So what? Who cares what he says? What he like or dislikes has no influence on any idea, the accuracy of ideas stands apart from him. If what Trump say is important to you, seek help.
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It has been in the news all week. Check the business page for news about the PG&E stock price.
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They say Paradise burned in 36 minutes. The fire was moving as fast as 80 MPH. There were only 3 roads out of town, all of which were so clogged that many people gave up, got out of their cars and ran for it on foot. And most of the dead were elderly who take a longer time to evacuate due to their mobility issues.
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'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.'
That's basically the same thing that got me excited about micros. Screw the big computer and $3,000 device board I can't afford. Give me the little, affordable $5 IC with some wires and a bread-board and let me experience something myself.
Ample Annie (Score:1)
A Good Guy (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to buy memory chips from him. Wonderful guy full of excitement concerning anything having to do with building your own computer. An information spreader. Serial Good Guy that would help anyone out with tips on DIY, and "where to get it" advice.
RIP (Score:3)
Just my 2 cents
I was lucky. (Score:4, Informative)
I was lucky to have been involved in the beginning of the Micro Computer era. I worked for Mt Takayoshi Shiina at SORD Computer of Japan in the early 1980's. I remember talking with Mt Godbout, George Morrow who passed away some time ago from cancer I believe and Mt Shiina as a 20 something starry eyed kid that was totally enthralled with microcomputers and watching the business explode with ideas.
God's speed Mt Godbout!
Lived vicariously the heroic days of computing (Score:2)
I lived vicariously the golden, heroic days of microcomputing via my S-100 computer hobby, and the Godbout cards are some of the nicest, best engineered ones. From everything I read about him, I could deduce that he was a generous, giving and thriving man, a pillar of the home computing community.
He will be missed dearly.
Can't Bear to Part With My S100s (Score:1)
I can't bear to part with my S100 computers; Vector Graphics and Alpha Micro. I'll take them to my grave. My Alpha Micro colleagues feel the same way. IIRC, at the Atlantic City Computer Festival (August 1976?), I rode the elevator up with Carl Helmers, editor of Byte Magazine. He was excited by a meeting where the various hardware manufactures agreed on a moniker of S100. I also had a conversation with Steve Jobs at his cardtable booth. He claimed to have advanced orders for 600 Apple 1 boards. I thought t
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Consider dropping them if you are running from a forest fire.
Was he? (Score:2)
"Bill Godbout was one of the earliest and most influential supports of the S-100 bus in the mid-1970s."
Most machines of that time were using little bits of plastic or even metal supports, so he was really thinking outside the box. Or maybe /. needs editors that know how to edit.
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He actually do be having a wikipedia page tho
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Godbout
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Depends on how old you were. S100 was a big deal back in the 70s.
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I just barely missed the S-100 era. By the time I had my first exposure to computers in 1981, the schools here were on TRS-80 systems (Models I and III), and the big epeen to strive for was the Apple ][ Plus.
My first of my own though was just a TI-99/4a (last minute save because the 'rents were seriously considering a $99 Timex-Sinclair 1000). What little social life I had at that time went instantly to zero for most of my high school years.
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I had a blast with her and learned a lot. Granted, we could never afford the expansion box, or a disk drive (got a nice 4a setup now); but I was still able to figure out plenty with just the base system, cassette recorder, and speech synthesizer.
Also built up my own little library of BASIC programs by borrowing the various TRS-80 books from my school's computer lab and converted many of them from TRS-80 BASIC to TI BASIC.
I do not have any regrets over being a 99er. I was one of the lucky few kids in town
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And I also have to say that the PEB, the Peripheral Expansion Box just looks so freaking cool and classy; and if they were not still largely unobtanium as they have always been; I would consider getting ahold of a third one to use as a case for a small footprint motherboard Debian/Windows 7 box.
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(I am 99% positive that was actually Leonard Nimoy they got to declare "Damage Repaired, Captain!" when you managed to tag a starbase before you could go boom)
That Nimoy voice sample was in the arcade version. The TI chip supported custom samples (B-17 Bomber on Intellivision famously had a custom startup voice), so they probably used the same recording. That's also impressive since a lot of home conversions never had access to the original game assets. (ColecoVision games in particular rented an arcade machine as the "reference".) I wouldn't be surprised to find that the arcade version used the TI chip too, since voice samples were enormous back then unless you
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BYTE magazine would be a good indication. There are online manuals which cover the bus and CPU's:
http://www.s100computers.com/M... [s100computers.com]
http://www.pestingers.net/page... [pestingers.net]
Before home computers, if you wanted a computer system, you had to build it yourself as a S-100 rack mounted system. You could buy all sorts of add-on boards (CPU, speech synthesizer, text display video board). Everything was rack mounted. CPU's were beefy for the time: 68030
http://www.s100computers.com/H... [s100computers.com]
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Re:RIP but... (Score:4, Informative)
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Thanks for the reference. Looks worth digging up, but might be hard to find around here...
Two of the first PCs I worked on were S-100s, though I didn't have enough money in those days to buy my own. One of them was owned by a residential coop, and the other was at a commercial real estate company. Both of them were pretty massive machines for their day. I think one of them had a gigantic 5- or even 10-MB hard disk. Pretty sure it had 8-inch platters that you could see though a plastic dome. It had a weird m
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I didn't say he deserved to die in a fire. And only losers like you use 'tard' as an insult.
What? You mean like all the loser Slashtards that call anyone who posts ANYTHING in support of a particular product or computer platform a "fanboi" or a "shill".
Yeah. "Slashtard" fits most perfectly.
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Go molest your daughter some more your flamin douche bag.
I am simply blinded by your dazzling wit. ...and not only is it "you", not "your"; but it is also "flamin' ", not "flamin".
As I said...
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So who died and left you their UID, junior?
Re: /. Serving malicious ads! (Score:1)
I have been watching this fire grow for sometime now. Every night I turn on the tv and Iâ(TM)m horrified by how far it has spread. It seems like the fire spreads faster on a daily basis than anyone could have predicted and it breaks its own records every day. Thinking of these poor people I just want to hide my head under the blankets. I canâ(TM)t even imagine the Herculean effort that will be required to build an entire forest from nothing. We should all be thankful that such dedication exists am