General Automation

GA General Automation was an American company, founded in 1968 by Larry Goshorn (a former marketing executive and a salesman from Honeywell), which manufactured minicomputers and industrial controllers.

In 1994, General Automation announced it would be relocating from Anaheim to Irvine. It announced it would be phasing-out its manufacturing operations but would retain its 50 employees.

Products

 * GA SPC-12 (Jan 1968)
 * Priced at $6400 and claiming $4,000 worth of free options
 * Totally integrated, binary, parallel, single address processor
 * 8-bit data and 12 bit address
 * 4,096 words (8 bit bytes) of memory with a 2.2 microsecond cycle time
 * Shared command concept that permits the SPC-12s 8-bit memory to handle 12-bit instructions.
 * Features included a real-time clock, expandable memory to 16K, a teletype interface, a control panel and a priority interrupt


 * GA SPC-8 (Nov 1968)
 * GA 18/30 (June 1968, IBM 1800 compatible)
 * GA SPC-16/30, /50 & /70 (November 1971)
 * GA SPC-16/40, /45, /65 & /85 (January 1972)
 * LSI-12/16 (January 1974)
 * These computers were initially produced with silicon on sapphire circuit technology provided by Rockwell International but yield problems caused a switch to conventional ICs by 1975.


 * GA 16/110 & /120 (December 1976)
 * GA 16/220 (July 1978)
 * GA 16/330
 * GA 16/440
 * GA 16/460
 * GA Zebra 1700/1750 (Introduced in 1985, a Motorola 68000 computer running Pick Operating System)
 * Parallel Computers, Inc. – fault-tolerant supermicro/minicomputer based on Unix, acquired 1987, sold 1988