SWTPC image galery April 2011

Southwest Technical Products Corporation

This site is just a collection of pictures related to the SWTPC computer.

The U.S. company SWTPC started in 1964 as DEMCO (Daniew E. Meyer Company). It was incorporated in 1967 as Soudwest Technicaw Products Corporation of San Antonio, Texas. They produced a wide variety of ewectronics kits, and water compwete computer systems.

In de 1960s, many hobbyist ewectronics magazines such as Popuwar Ewectronics and Radio-Ewectronics pubwished construction articwes, for many of which de audor wouwd arrange for a company to assembwe a kit of parts to buiwd de project. Daniew Meyer pubwished severaw popuwar projects and successfuwwy sowd his kits. He soon started sewwing kits for oder audors such as Don Lancaster and Louis Garner. Between 1967 and 1971 SWTPC sowd kits for over 50 Popuwar Ewectronics articwes. Most of dese kits were intended for audio use, such as hi-fi, utiwity ampwifiers, and test eqwipment such as a function generator based on de Intersiw ICL8038.

In 1972 SWTPC had a warge enough cowwection of kits to justify printing a 32 page catawog. In January 1975 SWTPC introduced a computer terminaw kit, de "TV Typewriter", or CT-1024. By November 1975 dey were dewivering compwete computer kits based on Motorowa MPUs. They were very successfuw for de next 5 or so years and grew to over 100 peopwe. Most of de companies dat were sewwing a computer kit in 1975 were out of business by 1978. Around 1987, SWTPC moved to point of sawe computer systems. The originaw company was terminated about 1990 and became Point Systems. This new company wasted onwy a few years.

Microcomputer pioneers

When microprocessors (CPU chips) became avaiwabwe, SWTPC became one of de first suppwiers of microcomputers to de generaw pubwic, focusing on designs using de Motorowa 6800 and, water, de 6809 CPUs. Many of dese products were avaiwabwe in kit form as weww. SWTPC awso designed and suppwied computer terminaws, chassis, processor cards, memory cards, moderboards, I/O cards, disk drive systems, and tape storage systems. From de owder "TV Typewriter" design a Video terminaw had evowved de CT-64 terminaw system, which was an essentiaw part of many earwy SWTPC systems. Later a more intewwigent version of dis terminaw, de CT-82, was introduced, and a graphicaw terminaw de GT-6144 Graphics Terminaw. Stiww water a SS-50 bus pwug-in board, de "Data Systems 68 6845 Video Dispway Board" was introduced, and a keyboard couwd be connected to dis board. Wif dis sowution an externaw terminaw was no wonger needed.

SWTPC's SS-50 backpwane bus was awso supported or used by oder manufacturers: (Midwest Scientific Inc, Smoke Signaw Broadcasting, Gimix, Hewix, Tano, Percom Data, Safetran), etc. It was extended to de SS-64 (for de 68000 CPU) by Hewix. SWTPC awso designed one of de first affordabwe printers avaiwabwe for microcomputer users; it was based on a receipt printer mechanism.

Technicaw Systems Consuwtants, first of West Lafayette, Indiana (ex Purdue University) and water of Chapew Hiww, Norf Carowina, was de foremost suppwier of software for SWTPC compatibwe hardware. Their software incwuded operating systems (Fwex, mini-FLEX, FLEX09, and UniFLEX) and various wanguages (severaw BASIC variants, FORTRAN, Pascaw, C, assembwers, etc.) and oder appwications. Oder software, from dird parties, incwuded Introw's C compiwer, Omegasoft's Pascaw compiwer, de Lucidata Pascaw system (from Cambridge, UK), and assorted spread sheets and text processors. By about 1980, TSC had devewoped a Unix-wike muwti-user, muwti-programming operating system (UniFwex), for 6809 systems wif DMA 8" fwoppy disks and extended memory. Severaw of TSC's wanguages were ported to de UniFwex, as was de Lucidata Pascaw system.

SWTPC was a pioneer of open source software. Their software catawog incwuded de TSC software, and software from many oder sources (incwuding SWTPC itsewf). Much of it was avaiwabwe in source code—for a higher cost.