          INFOWORLD   MAY 21, 1984   VOLUME 6, ISSUE 21



                          THE INDUSTRY

Q & A:  WILLIAM GODBOUT
'I do nothing to disparage the image of a maverick'

By Tom Shea
Reporter


William Godbout, chairman and CEO of Compupro, is one of the old timers of the
microcomputer business.  A techie, a businessman, and a maverick, Godbout has
been selling computers in one form or another for nearly 11 years.  His company
started out as Compukit in 1973, supplying microcomputer kits to hobbyists.  
Over the years, Compupro has evolved into a leading supplier of S-100 computers
and board products, selling systems and board-level components to commercial,
industrial, and scientific organizations.  
     S-100 computers (based on the IEEE-696/S-100 standard) are a favorite of
software developers and knowledgeable computer insiders because they are modu-
lar, flexible and expandable.  
     Recently the firm has added another computer,-- it's first non-S-100 bus
machine.  The Compupro 10 is a four-user system packaged in a stylish case and
based on a fast 8088 microprocessor.  It is aimed at the office market.

[Are you a techie at heart?]
    I enjoy both worlds.  I enjoy what I'm doing.  George Morrow summed it up
far more eloquently than I.  He said, "I have the best of both worlds.  I enjoy
what I'm doing, have immense fun at it, and I get paid to boot."  I couldn't
concur more.  Pushing piles of paper doesn't thrill me.  It's something I can
fairly well, frankly.  I can push paper with the best of them.
    I do nothing to disparage the image of a maverick, though.  If mavericks 
are selling this year, then I'm going to be a maverick--to stand out from the
crowd.  I like Liberace's line:  "Go ahead and stare.  I don't dress this way
to go unnoticed."  Some of the things we do (like George Morrow with his chame-
leon green running shoes and blue jeans)-- it's comfortable, but some of it is
an affectation.  We do certain things to be somewhat outrageous--to stand apart
from the crowd.  Why be part of a mob?

[You have something of the reputation of a maverick.]
     I'm really a hidebound New Englander.  I may appear different.  For inst-
ance, I don't sell things that I don't own.  I don't sell the Brooklyn Bridge,
for instance.  We have a reputation for paying our bills....  We may stick out
like sore thumbs in a business that's known for charlatanry.  Only recently,
when some of the bigger kids moved in, has some mantle of respectability come
upon the business.  This is not to denigrate the majority of the firms--even
the new start-ups that are run on sound financial business principles.  But
there have been a pile of frauds, too.

[While the world is going to MS-DOS, you're not a big fan.  Why?]
    That is a very complex question.  It's not that I'm anti-MS-DOS.  If you
look at the software, there are very few machines really running MS-DOS.  It
is PC-DOS.  MS-DOS has a striking similarity to CP/M 1.4.  When the IBM machine
was first released, its operating system could only recognize 64K of system
memory.  Now that seems to have all the characteristics of an 8-bit job control
language, which is what CP/M was in the early stages.  CP/M was not an oper-
ating system, properly considered, it was a job-control language.

[Are you saying that MS-DOS is a job-control language,not an operating system?]
     Yes--the first release especially.  IBM has recently released two others,
but those are PC-DOS. The bulk of the microcomputers in the world are PC-DOS 
rather than MS-DOS.

[Yet MS-DOS has that thing which has eluded the microcomputer market for a long
time--standardization.]
    No it doesn't.  Quite the contrary.  With the PC and some work-alikes, some
software will run and some won't.  I defy you to take a piece of software writ-
ten for the IBM PC, and --take any five machines--line them up and have them 
run the same software.  There's a nonstandard.


[But everyone's supposedly writing software for MS-DOS because it's a standard.]
     Unless you could duplicate IBM's hardware and firmware--those read-only
memories that are splashed around the upper half of the 8088's address space--
most of those programs like Flight Simulator will not run.  They're making
hardware specific calls.  They do not go into a generalized location in the
in an operating system in order to cause some peripheral or some device inside
the machine to wiggle.  So it's a nonstandard.

[You are working on some IBM PC-compatible hardware, though.  What are you com-
ing out with?]
    We've got an S-100 board that combines both the IBM PC color-graphics card
and the monochrome-adaptor card and plugs into an S-100 machine.  We've got one
over there now and it's running--not only with an 8088 running at 4 MHz but 
also with our standard 8-MHz 8088, with the 10-MHz 8086, and it runs with the
286.  The only difference you notice is it gets faster every time you change 
the processor.

[So?]
     You get the full IBM PC graphics and alpha stuff in black-and-white or
color.  You want to know what operating system it's running under?  CP/M--
well they dropped the appelation CP/M.  It's now Concurrent DOS 3.1.  We've 
got it running under MP/M, and the old CP/M-86, and all the others.

[What things of great signifigance have you noticed over the last 11 years
that you've spent in this business?]
    Many of them are unspeakable.

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