North Star: Four star performers for the S-100 bus

A simple advert for North Star's range of S-100 boards - designed for its own Horizon micro, but compatible with any other S-100 micro running Intel's 8080 or the Zilog Z-80 processor.

The range included a 16K RAM board which could work at the Z-80's full clock speed with no wait states. This retailed for $549, or about [[370|1978]] in [[now]] - that's [[24|1978]] million per gigabyte.

The "micro disk system" was even more expensive, at $799, or [[533|1978]] now. This at least included the S-100 interface board, a Shugart 5¼" floppy unit, a disk operating system and BASIC on a floppy.

There was also a Z80A processor board - the faster 4MHz version of the Z80, and a "hardware floating point" board. In the world of the IBM PC, this sort of thing would come to be known as a Maths Co-processor. 

Here, it gave access to much higher precision numbers and faster calculations - apparently 50 times faster than numeric calculations performed natively on the 8080 CPU itself. It was a bargain at $359 assembled - about [[240|1978]] now.