North Star Computers
A Berkeley outfit whose Horizon and idiosyncratic hard-sectored floppies were standard kit in early S-100 systems.
North Star Computers started in 1976 in Berkeley under the jokey name Kentucky Fried Computer, founded by Charles Grant and Mark Greenberg. The North Star Horizon (1977) shipped as a complete machine in a wooden case with an S-100 bus and the company's own floppy controller — hard-sectored, unlike the rest of the industry.
North Star BASIC and North Star DOS came with it, and its twelve-digit decimal number format was a selling point against rivals' ordinary floating point. The IBM PC and soft-sectored standards took over in the early 80s and the company faded away by 1984.