Chas Gilmore joined the Heath Company in 1966 as a design engineer in the company’s Scientific Instruments group. By 1976, he was director of engineering for Heath’s technical products, which included amateur radio, instrumentation, marine, automotive, and weather products. This article, Part 3 of a series, includes portions of an interview I conducted with Gilmore in October. This article picks up Gilmore’s narrative starting in 1976 and includes the development of Heath’s early microcomputer products, starting with the H8.
In the early part of the interview, Gilmore described meeting and working with Lou Frenzel at Heath. Frenzel wrote about microprocessors and microcomputers for decades in numerous books and publications. Together, Gilmore and Fenzel were largely responsible for getting Heath into the microcomputer kit business.
Chas Gilmore: Did you know Lou?
Steve Leibson: We corresponded. I don’t think we ever met face to face.
Chas Gilmore: Okay. Well, as you may have guessed from that, Lou and I were very good friends for about 50 years.
Steve Leibson: Oh, wow!
Chas Gilmore: You know he just died. January 2023. He had Parkinson’s.
Steve Leibson: Oh!
Chas Gilmore: And in the last year or 2 it really began to catch up with him.
Steve Leibson: Yeah.
Chas Gilmore: Very sad. He was a wonderful person. A prolific writer, as you, I’m sure, are very aware.
Steve Leibson: Oh yes!
Chas Gilmore: I think, some 30 books, or something of that nature, plus there must be thousands of articles.
Steve Leibson: Yes.
Chas Gilmore: You guys who do professional writing really can crank them out. I’ve not…
Steve Leibson: Pays the bills.
Chas Gilmore: Yes, I’ve got about five or six books to my name, but nowhere near that prolific.
Steve Leibson: Well, I think I have five or six books, too.
Chas Gilmore: Yeah, Lou was a real influence on getting me to write the first book, which was compiled from a series of articles I did for Radio-Electronics magazine. The book was on basic electronic instruments and published by TAB Books. Later there were books on electronic instruments and microprocessors published by McGraw-Hill. Well, the first thing that happened was the editor at Radio-Electronics – Hugo Gernsback – asked me, “Do you want to keep the book rights?”
“Huh! What’s this?” I thought.
Steve Leibson: The first time you’re asked that, you never know the answer.
Chas Gilmore: Well, something in me said, “Yeah, sure.” And then, I went and consulted with Lou, because we had just become friends. He had just come to Heath. I was probably five years into Heath at that point, and…
Steve Leibson: So, he’d been at Heath.
Chas Gilmore: Oh, yes! Lou was the brains behind the Heath Educational Systems product line. He came to Heath in the early seventies and started writing the courses, pulling together a department. He had left McGraw-Hill’s Educational division, and, very shortly, we wound up with a whole additional department devoted to Heathkit Educational Systems. It was all the trainers, the manuals, the coursework that went with it. Later, I was the technical guy, and he was the marketing guy behind the Heath personal computer line.
Later in the interview, Gilmore discussed the development of Heath’s early microcomputer kit products:
Chas Gilmore: We introduced the H8 in August of 1977 at the first annual PC Show in Atlantic City. We closed that year at $7 to $8 million in PC-related product. We started development on that, well, that backs up to Lou Frenzel and me. Both of us were just very interested in computer-related products. I’d gotten quite interested in microprocessors at that stage of the game. In fact, I had written one book on it, and Lou had been a computer hobbyist from way, way back. In the scientific instruments group, we had been using PDL-8Ls. DEC introduced those computers when they needed a minicomputer under $10,000. They beat that price by a dollar.
But oh, wow! I mean the things that we could do with it, controlling instruments. And this was just before we got rid of the spectroscopy line. You could really control that spectrophotometer and do a ton of control and measurement. So, Lou and I got to talking about, “Oh, man, you know, we could really begin to do some Heathkit computers.”
We went to the Executive Product Development Committee, the XPDC. And I can explain that structure to you if you’d like. It was a fairly unique new product development process, but really neat and worked well. We went to the XPDC and said we’d like to do a computer, and we proposed the H8. We got the usual response: “What the hell is somebody gonna do with a computer? Balance a checkbook?”
And it was not going to be a low-cost development project.
Finally, the Executive Product Development Committee, which had everybody, including the president of the company and all his direct reports, heads of various and sundry departments in it, said, “Okay. You can do it.” And normally Dave Nurse, who was the President, was very quiet at best. He’d just nod and the guy who was in charge of the product planning group would say, “Okay, it’s approved. You can go ahead,” and we’d approve so much engineering, etc.
Normally, all that Mr. Nurse would do was just nod. This time, he said, “Okay, but till that’s on the market and selling at forecast, I don’t want to hear of one more computer-related product.”
Steve Leibson: One and only one.
Chas Gilmore: One and only one. It’s going to be the H8. By the time we introduced it a year and a half later, we had the H8. We had the H-11, which was a kit of a DEC PDP-11 computer.
Heathkit H8 Microcomputer. Image credit: Computer History Museum
Steve Leibson: Right.
Chas Gilmore: We had the H-10 paper tape reader/punch. We had a printer. We had a terminal. And we had a number of other peripherals including some disk drives in development.
What helped to wake them up was that 1975 article in Radio-Electronics on the Altair.
Steve Leibson: Yeah, that was Popular Electronics.
Chas Gilmore: That was Popular Electronics. Yes, okay.
Steve Leibson: Yeah. The MITS Altair 8800.
The Heath Company introduced the Heathkit H8 microcomputer and H9 CRT terminal in 1977. Image credit: Marcin Wichary
Chas Gilmore: Yep, well it snowballed after that. We did go back, and we did get further permission, and, like I said, by the time we got to introduction, in August of ’77, we had several computer products. It took some time, because the Heathkit process is a slow one.
A company with a device like a MITS Altair can run circles around an organization like Heath with a new design from a development time standpoint. At the time, we were probably about 180 people in engineering, of which half were in design engineering and design engineering support, and the other half was in the manual department, which wrote the assembly manuals.
Oh! And we went through a very exhaustive process of proofing the kit to make sure that it was going to go together and work, etc. Which was above and beyond the technical proof that the product would work and meet specs, etc.
So, by the time we introduced the H8, there were a number of other personal computer products on the market. And so, we introduced in August, and we had basically September through December sales that came out to be in the seven or eight million dollar area for that few months of the year, and…
Steve Leibson: This was ‘77.
Chas Gilmore: This was ‘77. And to put it in perspective, I think the best-selling product line at Heathkit at the time was the electronic instruments, doing about $18 million a year. Amateur radio was probably $12 million to $14 million. Audio and TV would vie for third and fourth place depending on what was the latest product that popped out, and then the others were scattered at a lower level. The total company sales about that time were in the $65 or $71 million range. Something of that nature.
I left Heath shortly after all this computer stuff rolled out.
Part 4 of this article series continues with Gilmore’s return to Heath and the eventual demise of the company’s kit business.
Do you have Heathkit memories to share? Please post them below in the comments.
