Fido was originally the name of a computer I had in the late¨
70's. I was working for a friend's consulting company (Microft Inc,¨
Falmouth MA) and we were using my computer, which was in a four foot¨
high rack: 18 slot chassis with 14 cards (4MHz Z80, CPU 64K memory,¨
bootstrap ROM card (six cards so far\dots), 8" floppy ,DC-300 tape¨
drive, and a BASF 6172 8-inch Winchester tape drive which was as fast¨
as it was unreliable. (It had a progressive and degenerative disease¨
we called "the whoops"; the voice-coil head positioner make the¨
customary chirping sounds; the BASF's favorite failure mode was to¨
lose track of where it's head was at (quite literally) and instead of¨
the familiar chirping sounds as it seeked up and down the disk, it¨
made a sort of whooping sound, like a falling siren, followed by a¨
KLUNK as the positioner hit it's backstop. You had to power it down to¨
reset it. Most annoying.) The rear door was a rack of fans to keep it¨
all cool. It was extremely large and complex, and when it ran (most of¨
the time) quite powerful. It ran PDOS (a rather nice CP/M-80¨
compatible OS) and we did "C" (BDS and Whitesmiths) and assembly work¨
on it.

It had so many parts\dots{} I called it a mongrel. I had taken to¨
calling it "Fido". Debbie took a business card, whited-out the name¨
and wrote in "Fido, Office Computer".

The name stuck.

