Oh man that’s so cool you have a Red Lightning. Thanks for sharing the pics. Here’s what Bob had to say on the RL:
Red Lightning
This was the only system to actually get prototypes built, or at least one prototype, which I have in my collection. The idea was to build a machine meant for sale at Sears and other mass market stores. While this seems pretty common nowadays, it was radical thinking at the time, since computers were sold at computer stores with trained personnel.
The Red Lightning was a basic Apple clone, like the ACE-1000, but instead of a cover that could be removed to reveal slots, it had four cartridge slots in the back. Users could buy a disk cartridge that had one or two drives, a serial port cartridge that had a terminal program and RS-232 port, a printer cartridge, etc.
I was the lead software engineer on this product, and while it borrowed a lot of code from the ACE-1000 series, the cartridge system was entirely new. This was one of the times when the hardware and software teams didn’t see eye-to-eye as software wanted status LEDs, DIP switches to set parameters, etc. Hardware guys complained about the cost of an LED and associated resistor… pennies, but if we built hundreds of thousands of machines then those pennies added up quickly.
To the best of my knowledge, there was only one prototype built, which I have, and no cartridges. I spent my last few weeks working on the serial cartridge software.
