George Morrow (computers)

Starting in 1976, he designed and sold computers, computer parts, and accessories under several company names, including Thinker Toys (changed after CBS threatened a suit as it was too close to their trademark Tinker Toys) and restarted the business as Morrow Designs.

His initial product was an Intel 8080 board with an octal-notation keypad, but it proved unappealing to hobbyists who preferred the binary notation and flip switches of the Altair 8800.

Afterwards, he attempted a 16-bit machine based on the National Semiconductor PACE CPU with the help of Bill Godbout, Chuck Grant, and Mark Greenberg.

In 1982, he issued the Morrow Micro Decision line, a group of single-board Z80 machines designed to answer the high price of computer hardware.

The Micro Decision series was introduced in late 1982 and offered with either one or two single-sided 3/4 height floppy drives, using a 40-track disk format with five 1024-byte sectors per track for an unformatted capacity of about 200k.

The floppy controller in the Micro Decision was based around the NEC u765 FDC found in the IBM PC rather than the more common WD 17xx series FDCs.

At the same time when the version 2.0 PCBs were introduced, Morrow also began offering the MD-3 which had two double-sided, half-height floppy drives for a 400k storage capacity.

[5][6] Following the collapse of his computer businesses, Morrow devoted the rest of his life to his hobby of collecting original 78 RPM jazz and dance records from the 1920s and 1930s.

Until his death, he digitally transcribed and restored thousands of recordings using a computer system he developed, reissuing them under his Old Masters label.