
Bill Godbout, a legend in the S-100 community, died in the Camp wildfire - ohjeez
http://vcfed.org/wp/2018/11/13/r-i-p-bill-godbout-79/
======
peepopeep
Family lost everything they own in the fire. Here is their Gofundme campaign:
[https://www.gofundme.com/godbouttuckcampfirerelieffund](https://www.gofundme.com/godbouttuckcampfirerelieffund)

~~~
joering2
My heart goes out to them but I hate seeing Gofundme campaigns used for such
purposes. All the time I see campaigns to cover someones medical bills or
accident costs. No, we have insurance for that! What happened in California
was a natural disaster and will be covered by what every home owner in Cali is
forced to pay out every month in mandatory tax for such cathaclism. We as a
society will be in very dengerous spot when people start ignoring obtaining
reasonable insurance and just hope for successful Gofoundme campaign when
things go south.

~~~
ridgeguy
Your insurance coverage can vanish in a moment. A current anecdote..

I live in a neighborhood of ~80 small lots/homes a few miles west of Palo
Alto. Since Oct.1, nine of our neighbors have had their fire insurance
policies terminated immediately on receipt of the mailed notices. Most of the
nine had their policies in place for >15 years. Not like they were dodging the
need for insurance.

Gofundme has its uses. I hope it brings at lease a small measure of ease to
the Godbout family.

~~~
cagenut
insurance companies are the vehicle through which the financial lunacy of
suburban sprawl will be squeezed to death.

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ChuckMcM
This is sad for me. I had a Cromemco S-III system and two 32K Static RAM cards
that were sold by Godbout. They had been recommended to me as 'tanks' and were
much more reliable than the dynamic memory cards of the time.

I am truly sorry that his life was ended by this latest fire disaster.

~~~
mschaef
> They had been recommended to me as 'tanks' and were much more reliable than
> the dynamic memory cards of the time.

Interesting to hear that.... I've recently been reading through old issues of
DTACK Grounded, and Hal Hardenberg said similar things, and at length, about
the reliability improvements you get with static memory over dynamic. (A few
years in, he was also selling dynamic memory products, presumably for scale,
and was no longer able to ground DTACK in his designs.)

~~~
ChuckMcM
I missed Hal's rants, you can read DTACK Grounded online here:
[http://www.easy68k.com/paulrsm/dg/](http://www.easy68k.com/paulrsm/dg/)

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jacquesm
There is a name I never expected to see again. That is a real pity, I never
had an S-100 system but I read a lot about them and knew what made them tick,
it was impossible to avoid reading about Bill and his work if you were
interested in that sort of thing.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Godbout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Godbout)

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mindcrime
Sad news indeed. I've been doing a lot of "retro computing" stuff lately,
including starting a project to build a Z80 based machine. And one of the
things I keep coming across references to is the S-100 bus. It seems to have
been a key component of a lot of the earlier PC's.

Anyway, R.I.P. Mr. Godbout. And here's hoping we don't lose anyone else to the
wildfires.

~~~
mschaef
> I keep coming across references to is the S-100 bus.

The S-100 bus originated in the Altair 8800, essentially as a direct copy of
the 8080 (CPU) bus. From there, it took on a life of it's own, very much like
the IBM PC's ISA bus did a few years later... there were companies building
S-100 expansion boards for existing computers, new computer backplanes built
around S-100, faster CPU's, etc. (IIRC, there were CPU's at least as fast as a
Motorola 68020... so quite away from it's more humble 8080 origins.)

S-100 was very important for it's time...

~~~
Gibbon1
> S-100 was very important for it's time...

Lot of people doing serious software development at the time were either using
minicomputers or S-100 systems.

------
ghaff
R.I.P. For nostalgia's sake, Frank Hayes' S-100 Bus song:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow78cUDdTOg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow78cUDdTOg)

It appeared on the compilation Vince Emery Presents the Funniest Computer
Songs (1989).

~~~
ohjeez
Tangent: Amazing how there aren't any songs about computers. Or email.

But thousands about "send me a letter."

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protomyth
His S-100 computer was a beast (in a good way). The narrative provided by
Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor column in Byte really gave great insights. This
is just sad.

~~~
mschaef
> Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor

As soon as I saw the name Godbout, my mind immediately jumped to Pournelle,
whom I mainly read as an early-teen in the mid-late 80's. Even at that late
date, Pournelle referred back enough to his older S-100 machines that I got a
sense of their importance, even if I didn't know of it first hand. (Come to
think of it, the S-100 machines were around 10 years old or less at the time,
so about as old as an original iPhone is today.)

Also, I can't mention Pournelle without thinking of this:
[http://www.panix.com/~clp/humor/computers/general/Jerry-
Pour...](http://www.panix.com/~clp/humor/computers/general/Jerry-Pournelle-
parody.html) :-)

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rman666
I had completely forgotten about the S-100 bus. It was a major development
back in the day. Sad news. Condolences to his family and friends.

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mark-r
I'm pretty sure I still have a couple of Godbout S-100 cards in the basement.
In particular I think it was a Godbout memory card at the heart of my system.

So sad to hear of his passing, especially in such an awful way.

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CrankyBear
Miserable news.

