Action Computer Enterprise
Action Computer Enterprise, Inc. (ACE), was an American computer company that was active from 1978 to 1990. The company delivered one of the first multi-user-capable microcomputers, the Discovery 1600, in 1978. History Foundation (1978–1979) Action Computer Enterprise was co-founded by four friends, including Herbert L. Siegel (February 27, 1938 – August 16, 2016), Kwok M. Ong, and Wing Chung. Ong, Siegel and the fourth founder had met during their employment at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, while Chung and Ong had met at their alma mater of University of California, Berkeley. Long before starting ACE, Siegel had served in the Peace Corps, teaching in Ethiopia with his wife for two years in the 1960s before returning to the United States to obtain an M.A. in mathematics at UC Berkeley. After graduation, he worked as a programmer for JPL, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder, and the Los Angeles County General, developing navigation strategies for JPL and their contract for the Voyager program; voter tracking systems for the Registrar-Recorder; and patient identification systems for the County General. Chung meanwhile was an immigrant who lived in Hong Kong post–World War II before moving to the United States to graduate from UC Berkeley and later Columbia University with degrees in mathematics, his master's degree at the latter university sponsored by the IBM Watson Fellowship. Chung moved to New Jersey to work for Roche before convincing his family to invest $50,000 in Action Computer Enterprise, his startup co-founded in 1978 with Siegel and company. ACE was founded in one of the founder's home garages in Pasadena, California. It soon occupied an office in the city, growing to a staff of 30 in the early 1980s. Siegel was named chairman, while Chung was named vice president of ACE. The company's early days were spent developing what Chung later claimed to be the first multi-user microcomputer on the market. The company branded this computer as the Discovery 1600 and first released it in April 1979. Discovery 1600 and Discovery 500 (1979–1983) The Discovery 1600 was an SBC-based microcomputer based on an IEEE-696-compliant S-100-bus backplane. The system could carry one service processor card and up to fifteen user processor cards on its bus, with room to spare for S-100 peripheral cards (so long as they could support port-mapped I/O). The service processor acts as a controller for the S-100 bus and floppy and hard disk drives. User processor cards, on the other hand, provide the means of interaction and multi-user capability, through the use of video terminals plugged into each of their serial ports. Depending on the type of user processor card (variants described below), either vanilla CP/M or CP/M-86 can be run as an independent operating system on each user processor. The assignment of operating systems to each user card was facilitated by Discovery's custom DPOS (Distributed Processing Operating System). The Discovery 1600's main service processor card (dubbed the dpc-283 processor) features a Zilog Z80A microprocessor with 96 KB of RAM, a DMA controller, one parallel