North Star Horizon (1977)
All the pieces were there. North Star's FPB and MDS were affordable, reliable, and convenient for computer hobbyists. North Star DOS, North Star BASIC, North Star Extended BASIC, North Star PASCAL, and North Star monitor worked with s-100 hardware and were optimized for North Star hardware. Everything also worked with CP/M, a 3rd party had created a CP/M variant for North Star hardware. There were FORTRAN, COBOL, hex editors, text editors, assembly, IDEs, Word processors, payroll, mailing list managers, inventory, database, accounting, and POS pregames designed with North Star hardware compatibility. They decided to create their own computer in a wooden box (this became a metal box soon after NSH's release). The North Star Horizon's design would be unusual in that it put the main Z80A CPU, 16K RAM, ROM, 2 serial ports, and the MDS system (with NSDOS and Extended BASIC) on the motherboard and included two disk drives by default for $1899. A one disk drive option was also available for $1599. Most other s-100 computers only used the motherboard to hold the s-100 slots and everything else had to plug in, and be purchased separately, most likely from several different companies, including the CPU board(s). Horizon still could use s-100 accessories, there were 12 slots, and it was readily compatible with z80 or 8080 boards. The Horizon could be unboxed and without needing any hardware to be assembled or added, just worked. Well, except for a terminal with display and keyboard. North Star did sell those as well, but their's never seemed to catch on. North Star's floating point board was of course a preinstalled option. The also offered a z80 board that worked as a concurrent coprocessor. And there was an 8080 board option. All the Horizon s-100 boards were fully compatible with any s-100 machine and their MDS remained a popular accessory in the entire market. The drives were initially single-density, single-sided (89kB). When every variant of single-density, double-density, single-sided and double-sided were announced, people stopped buying drives and waited for the DS-DD 360kB. North Star just managed to survived this fiasco. By 1979 they had added 32k RAM boards to their product line. And 64K RAM boards at some point. Their dives were tremendously successful but, within a year of their availability, successful techniques to use soft-sectored floppy disks with only one index hole (or none) were created. Most famously, Steve Wozniak designed Apple's drives to function without an index hole and for this reason the drive needed no hardware to find the sectors. Soft-sector did not normally go out of alignment. Hard sectors disks remained faster and more reliable for a time but the rest of the industry was betting on soft-sector drives and they had always been cheaper. Also, the rest of the industry was moving away from Z80 in favor of the x86 architecture. Because of dwindling use of s-100 hardware, Z80 and hard-sectored drives, creating games and software for North Star computers meant using North Star hardware and North Star software for development. Even the universally common BASIC language did not deal with hard-sectored disks, so North Star BASIC was required. hard-sectored floppy disks were so different from every other system that most developers didn't want to be bothered with it. Despite being one of the first home computers to put almost everything in an works-out-of-the-box the never moved away from the computer+terminal design. Their competition used monitors and keyboards. North Star was not aggressive in transitioning to x86 and never game up on hard-sectored drives. The company cease operating in 1984.

North Star Advantage (1982)
Same Z80A CPU and disk drives, SS-DD standard. It could beep (which can be abuse to produce multiple tones). Same options as the Horizon plus more. 64K RAM (expandable to 768K?), 16K "graphics RAM" (it used dedicated video RAM). A 5MB Winnie (IBM Winchester Disk hard drive, "hard drive" was not a term yet) was an option. North Star began offering an 8088 coprocessor board that was MS-DOS 1.0 compatible at this time. The DOS 1.0 compatibility was of little use as IBM PC DOS 1.10 was much more widely used by that time. Hardly anything worked with MS-DOS 1.0 anymore. The dedicated 16K video RAM was of importance, because of the 640x240 pixel display capability. 8 parallel ports allowed for the simultaneous use of 8 parallel terminals. This was a popular enough use by customers that North Star would use a server-workstation design as their next computer.

North Star Dimension (1984)
NOT in UVL's Norther Star Computers platform
This is a different beast. It was called a server. And used an 80186 CPU. Technically, it is an IBM PC-compatible. If there are games for it, they probably belong in separate platform or perhaps in the DOS platform with a North Star Dimension tag. It was designed to use 8086 based modified IBM XT BUS boards to connect with external parallel port terminals. It shipped with a custom MS-DOS with TurboDOS and Novell NetWare as options. It allowed up to 12 parallel workstations (and 24 serial terminals, but no body did that anymore) to share up to 16 disk or tape backups or "fixed drives" (still no "Hard Drive" term), 12 modems, and/or 12 printers. 80x25 text, 640x400 graphics, 640x200 graphics.
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