GA General Automation was an American company, founded in 1968 by Burt Yale and Larry Goshorn (a former marketing executive and a salesman from Honeywell), which manufactured minicomputers and industrial controllers. General Automation was originally located in Orange, California. In the late 1970s, GA relocated to Anaheim, California.
In 1971, Ray Noorda, the future CEO of Novell, joined GA as executive vice-president. In 1971 General Automation increased its sales to $10.6 million and showed its first profit of $3,000. In 1972, sales increased to $16 million with net income of $1.56 million. By 1973 sales jumped to $30.4 million.
In 1990, GA reported a loss of $221,000 on revenues of $39,248,000.
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.
By 2002, General Automation was doing business under the name GA eXpress, Inc. In 2003, GA eXpress filed a Form 8-K with the SEC stating it would go into receivership.
Products SPC-12Datamation, September 1968, p. 137 (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 SPC-8 (Nov 1968) GA 18/30 (June 1968, IBM 1800 and IBM 1130-compatible)Datamation, May 1969, p. 136 SPC-16/30, /50 & /70 (November 1971)Datamation, November 15, 1971, p. 112 SPC-16/40, /45, /65 & /85 (January 1972)Datamation, January 1972, p. 5 LSI-12/16 (January 1974)Datamation, January 1974, p. 105 These computers were initially produced with silicon on sapphire circuit technology provided by Rockwell InternationalDatamation, January 1974, p. 105 but yield problems caused a switch to conventional ICs by 1975.Datamation, January 1975, p. 18 GA 16/110 and 16/120 (December 1976) These SPC-16 compatible computers were based on a two-chip microprocessor supplied by Synertek 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 Xenix or Pick Operating System Parallel Computers, Inc. – fault-tolerant supermicro/minicomputer based on Unix, acquired 1987, sold 1988
References
External links Computer History Museum Documents at Bitsavers 18/30 Fortran IV Software Data Sheet