Re: What's Next for the Apple II?

[zeroone@nospam.nonet (zeroone)]

In article <n2ge00562kp0obs4qi5q9p3pd43sdo3so4@4ax.com>, Chris Morse
<chris@sorry.no.spam.com> wrote:
> I remember working for a small company, near the end of high school,
> called Alpha Products in Darien, CT.  They built an expansion card for
> the //e that used some SCSI chip to give the //e a second bus (called
> an A-Bus, I think).  There was an external box that let you then plug
> in all sorts of data acquisition cards into this new bus.  I started
> off there doing testing -- checking the cards with an ohm-meter and
> such.  Then did a little programming.. But I think they went out of
> business a little while later.. market was dropping.. It was basically
> run by 2 guys (owner and an engineer), a secretary, and me (part time,
> doing mostly testing and helping with shippping when loads were high.)


Hi Chris,

Back in the late 1980's, I was into the Tandy Color Computer 3 and
subscribed to a monthly publication called "The Rainbow Magazine" which
was a mag for CoCo 1, 2, and 3 owners, and Alpha Products almost always
had a full page ad each month for their A-Bus system which they made for
most of the popular computer systems during those days including the Apple
II family, C64/C128, Tandy CoCo series, PC compatibles, etc.  From the
looks of it, the A-Bus system itself was the same for all computer models,
just the interface to connect to each computer model was different. Plus
they had a plethora of input/output cards and stepper controller cards for
their A-Bus system. It looked interesting.

They had their address listed as 242-W West Avenue, Darien, CT

Also, a company by the name of Colorware, which I presume was bought up by
Alpha Products carried software for the CoCo 3, one of them called CoCo
Max III (a bitmap graphics program which was fully GUI) as well as a full
GUI wordprocessor called Max-10. Colorware had the exact same address as
Alpha Products in the late '80s.

Did you work for Alpha/Colorware during that time? I remember purchasing
CoCo Max III back in May of 1988.