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Industry | Computing Electronics |
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Founded | 1979 United Kingdom |
Headquarters | United Kingdom |
Products | TAN1648 VDU, Tangerine Microtan 65, Oric |
Tangerine Computer Systems [1] was a British microcomputer company founded in 1979 by Dr. Paul Johnson, Mark Rainer and Nigel Penton Tilbury in St. Ives, Cambridgeshire.
The very first product was the successful TAN1648 VDU kit which received much acclaim in the technical press.
The home computer market was beginning to move, albeit slowly, and it was essential to establish a presence. Development and expansion was imperative. It was decided that the latter two partners would relinquish their involvement in order to focus on their consultancy work.
Barry Muncaster became involved operationally and the company moved to new premises in Ely, Cambridgeshire. The company was later renamed, and was known as Oric Products International.
Tangerine produced one of the first 6502-based kit computers, the Microtan 65 . It had a 3U form factor, a small amount of memory (RAM), a video character generator and UHF modulator for use with a TV set, and a simple latch for entering hex data from a keypad, and the computer was designed to be expandable. The manual came with a one-kilobyte listing of Conway's Game of Life. An optional expansion board could be built with a UART, more memory and BASIC ROMs. Additional expansion boards became available later, offering more RAM, dedicated serial and parallel I/O boards, etc.
After the Microtan 65, Tangerine planned to build a desktop machine and managed to get as far as selling the design for the Microtan 2 also known as Tangerine Tiger to HH Electronics, better known for building amplifiers. They released it as the HH Tiger, but it was not a commercial success.
Several Prestel machines were sold, under the general designation of Tantel:
With the success of the ZX Spectrum Tangerine's backers suggested a home computer and Tangerine formed Oric Products International Ltd to develop and release the Oric-1 in 1983. A series of Oric computers (including the Oric Atmos) followed through to 1987.
On 13 October 1983 the factory of Kenure Plastics in Berkshire, where the Oric-1 was manufactured, burnt to the ground. The factory was rebuilt, minus a considerable stock of bits (including 15,000 old ROMs) that went to make up the Oric-1. In the meantime production was said to have restarted within 24 hours in a new factory.[ citation needed ] Just a day later, a neighbouring warehouse went up in flames. Police were said at the time to suspect that the arsonist got the wrong place first time round.[ citation needed ] It was about this time, too, that Tansoft moved to co-exist with Oric Research at the Techno Park, Cambridge.
About 160,000 Oric-1s were sold in the UK in 1983 with another 50,000 sold in France (where it was the top-selling machine that year). Although not the 350,000 predicted, it was enough for Oric International to be bought out by Edenspring and given £4m in funding. This enabled the release of the Oric Atmos, an improved successor to the Oric-1 which added a true keyboard and improved ROM.
Although the Atmos failed to turn around Oric's fortunes, in early 1985 they announced several forthcoming models, including an IBM-compatible and an MSX-compatible. On 1 February they demonstrated the Oric Stratos/IQ164 at the Frankfurt Computer Show; on the 2nd however, Edenspring put Oric International into receivership with Tansoft, by then a company in its own right, following in May.
French company Eureka bought the remains of Oric and, after renaming itself, continued to produce the Stratos under that name, followed by the Oric Telestrat in late 1986.
In December 1987 after announcing the Telestrat 2, Oric International went into receivership for the second and final time.
The Acorn Electron was a lower-cost alternative to the BBC Micro educational/home computer, also developed by Acorn Computers Ltd, to provide many of the features of that more expensive machine at a price more competitive with that of the ZX Spectrum. It had 32 kilobytes of RAM, and its ROM included BBC BASIC II together with the operating system. Announced in 1982 for a possible release the same year, it was eventually introduced on 25 August 1983 priced at £199.
The Aster CT-80 is a 1982 personal computer developed by the small Dutch company MCP, was sold in its first incarnation as a kit for hobbyists. Later it was sold ready to use. It consisted of several Eurocard PCB's with DIN 41612 connectors, and a backplane all based on a 19-inch rack configuration. It was the first commercially available Dutch personal/home computer. The Aster computer could use the software written for the popular Tandy TRS-80 computer while fixing many of the problems of that computer, but it could also run CP/M software, with a large amount of free memory Transient Program Area, (TPA) and a full 80×25 display, and it could be used as a Videotext terminal. Although the Aster was a clone of the TRS-80 Model I it was in fact more compatible with the TRS-80 Model III and ran all the software of these systems including games. It also had a built-in speaker which was compatible with such games software.
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MSX is a standardized home computer architecture, announced by ASCII Corporation on June 16, 1983. It was initially conceived by Microsoft as a product for the Eastern sector, and jointly marketed by Kazuhiko Nishi, the director at ASCII Corporation. Microsoft and Nishi conceived the project as an attempt to create unified standards among various home computing system manufacturers of the period, in the same fashion as the VHS standard for home video tape machines. The first MSX computer sold to the public was a Mitsubishi ML-8000, released on October 21, 1983, thus marking its official release date.
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The TRS-80 Model 100 is a portable computer introduced in April 1983. It is one of the first notebook-style computers, featuring a keyboard and liquid-crystal display, in a battery-powered package roughly the size and shape of a notepad or large book. The 224-page, spiral-bound User Manual is nearly the same size as the computer itself.
Fujitsu Siemens Computers GmbH was a Japanese and German vendor of information technology. The company was founded in 1999 as a 50/50 joint venture between Fujitsu Limited of Japan and Siemens of Germany. On April 1, 2009, the company became Fujitsu Technology Solutions as a result of Fujitsu buying out Siemens' share of the company.
The Dubna 48K is a Soviet clone of the ZX Spectrum home computer launched in 1991. It was based on an analogue of the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. Its name comes from Dubna, a town near Moscow, where it was produced on the "TENSOR" instrument factory, and "48K" stands for 48 KBs of RAM.
The Tangerine Microtan 65 was a 6502 based single board microcomputer, first sold in 1979, which could be expanded into, what was for its day, a comprehensive and powerful system. The design became the basis for what later became the Oric Atmos and later computers, which has similar keyboard addressing and tape I/O as in the Microtan 65. The Microtan 65 has a single step function that can be used for debugging at the hardware level. The computer was available as ready-built boards or as kits consisting of board and components requiring soldering together.
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Pravetz is a brand of personal computers produced in Bulgaria from 1979. They were widely used in scientific organizations and schools until the 1990s.
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Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single, non-technical user. These computers were a distinct market segment that typically cost much less than business, scientific, or engineering-oriented computers of the time, such as those running CP/M or the IBM PC, and were generally less powerful in terms of memory and expandability. However, a home computer often had better graphics and sound than contemporary business computers. Their most common uses were word processing, playing video games, and programming.
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Oric was the name used by UK-based Tangerine Computer Systems for a series of 6502A-based home computers sold in the 1980s, primarily in Europe.