Career
After college, he went straight into a job at IBM,[7] but found himself "involuntarily recalled" to active military duty in 1961 and subsequently spending most of the 1960s in the military, being discharged in 1968. Deciding not to return to a big company, although still holding IBM in esteem, he moved to the San Francisco Bay area to assist in turning around a company in financial difficulties, an operation which concluded successfully. With the same team, he subsequently founded another business in Oakland, California and, after selling this business, enjoyed a period of semi-retirement until a friend, Mike Quinn, introduced him to the electronics surplus business in which he became fascinated. In 1973, he established Godbout Electronics in the San Francisco Bay area,[8] out of a Quonset hut at Oakland International Airport.[7] The New York Times called it a "popular electronics store."[9] According to the Vintage Computer Federation, he was "a legend in the S-100 community for his 1970s-1980s work at Godbout Electronics and CompuPro."[10]
For his store, he purchased bulk discarded electronics largely from military suppliers.[7] Godbout "sold chips and memory boards by mail and did business with developers on a handshake basis."[11]
After renaming the company CompuPro, he worked with George Morrow to develop the S-100 data bus, the IEEE-696. The S-100 bus was sold as part of the Altair 8800 kit machine.[7]
Godbout manufactured S-100 compatible cards, which "formed the backbone of early systems like the Altair 8800 and homebrew machines, allowing techies to interface their processors and memory with peripherals and form useful microcomputers."[7]
In the 1980s, Godbout focused on networking and moved his company, renamed Viasyn, to Hayward, California. He was chairman of the business. Viasyn focused on custom computing equipment for “things like medical offices, the early electronic music scene, and even niche areas like elevator control systems."[7]