Wameco, Wmc, Mikos Engineering

Q: I'm compiling a "history" of WAMECO. This was a company founded in 1976-77 by three engineers at Dalmo-Victor and sold to Chuck Naegeli/ MIKOS Engineering in 1978. They did a full "set" of S100 boards including terminated motherboard, CPU, I/O, memory and disk controller, all in "passionate pink". I've interviewed the three principals - Norm WAlters, Dean MEyer and Grant COnnell but I'm still trying to locate Chuck Naegeli (or his wife Barbara) who provided kits based on the WAMECO boards and later bought them out and continued the line as MIKOS Engineering. My last information about Chuck places him at Cisco in 1999, living in Montara, California Any additional information on the company or help locating either of the Naegeli's would be greatly appreciated. And if you have any spare WAMECO hardware, I'm _very_ interested! Perhaps needless to say, this is not a commercial project but just an attempt to document and preserve information about a group of Homebrew Computer Club members who saw a chance to make computing available to other hobbyists and seized the opportunity. I hope to be able to present this material in November at the Vintage Computer Festival in Mountainview.

A: All I can say is "very interesting" - with interviews with three of the principals you've already done some tremendous work. I've seen a very small amount of WAMECO hardware over the years but can't say I even remember ads in BYTE or the other rags of the time from the company. What you've done so far is exactly the sort of thing we need done to document the small (often truly "garage" in the best sense) S-100-compatible companies that were springing up everywhere in that era.

Discuss It!

Mike Gregory said:

I'm in the process of building a wameco computer using all Wameco boards. However, I haven't been able to locate a picture of waht the FP-1 mask looked like. Anybody out there have such an animal??

chuckn said:

still have about 100 of the negatives for the mask in the garage

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