Tangerine Computer Systems
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British microcomputer company Tangerine Computer Systems[1] was founded in 1979 by Dr. Paul Johnson and Barry Muncaster and was run out of offices in Ely, Cambridgeshire. The company was later renamed, and was known in most of the 1980s as Oric International.
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[edit] An early 6502 machine: the Microtan 65
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 got as far as selling the design for the Microtan 2 aka Tangerine Tiger to a company who never built it.
[edit] The Oric-1
With the success of the Sinclair 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. Based on a 1 MHz 6502A CPU, it came in 16 KB or 48 KB RAM [2] variants for £129 and £169 respectively, matching the models available for the popular ZX Spectrum and undercutting the price of the 48K Spectrum by a few pounds. Both Oric-1 versions had a 16 KB ROM containing the operating system and a modified BASIC interpreter.
The Oric-1 improved somewhat over the Spectrum with a chiclet keyboard design replacing the Spectrum's renowned "dead flesh" one. In addition the Oric had a true sound chip, the programmable GI 8912, and two graphical modes handled by a semi-custom ASIC (ULA) which also managed the interface between the processor and memory. The two modes were a LORES text only mode (though the character set could be redefined to produce graphics) with 28 rows of 40 characters and a HIRES mode with 200 rows of 240 pixels above three lines of text. Like the Spectrum, the Oric-1 suffered from attribute clash—albeit to a lesser degree in HIRES mode, when a single row of pixels could be coloured differently from the one below in contrast to the Spectrum, which applied foreground and background color in 8 x 8 pixel blocks. As it was meant for the home market, it had a built in television RF modulator as well as RGB output and was meant to work with a basic audio tape recorder to save and load data.
According to the Oric World website (see External links, below), 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.
[edit] The Atmos
The Edenspring money enabled Oric International to release the Oric Atmos, which added a true keyboard and an updated V1.1 ROM to the Oric-1. Unfortunately, it also added a faulty tape error checking routine. Soon after the Atmos was released, the modem, printer and 3-inch floppy disk drive originally promised for the Oric-1 were announced and released by the end of 1984.
[edit] The Stratos, the Telestrat, and The end
The Atmos failed to turn around Oric International's fortunes, but they persevered and in early 1985 Oric announced several new machines were on the way, including an IBM compatible and an MSX-compatible computer. On February 1st it 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.
[edit] The clones
A Yugoslavian company (believed to be Avtotehna, based in Ljubljana) obtained a licence to make 5000 machines. Machines were made, but whether they were under license or not is not known in any detail. It is thought that they assembled parts shipped from the UK. They were Atmos based, the only difference being the logo indicating Oric Nova 64 instead of Oric Atmos 48k.
A Bulgarian machine called the Pravetz 8D was produced between 1986 and 1989. The Pravetz is entirely hardware and software compatible with the Oric Atmos. The major change on the hardware side is the bigger white case that hosts a comfortable mechanical keyboard and an integrated power supply. The BASIC Rom has been patched to host both a Western European and Cyrillic alphabet - the upper case character set produces Western European characters, which lower case gives Cyrillic letters. In order to ease the use of the two alphabets, the Pravetz 8D is fitted with a CAPS LOCK key. A Disk II compatible interface and a custom DOS, called DOS-8D, have been created circa 1990.
[edit] Notes
- ^ The choice of the company's name, Tangerine, was inspired by the success of the-then already famous (in the computer business world) Apple Computer.
- ^ The 48k Oric machines are actually really 64k machines. The top 16k of memory are masked by the BASIC Rom and thus normally not available for the user. The disc drive unit contains some additional hardware that makes it able to enable or disable the ROM, effectively adding 16k of RAM to the machine. This additional memory is used by the system to store the Oric DOS software.
[edit] References
- Haworth, Jonathan (1992). Oric - The Story So Far. 2nd edition. Cambridge, England.online here
[edit] External links
[edit] Link portals
- Oric.org – The main Oric community portal
- The Oric FAQ – For Microtan 65, Oric 1, Oric Atmos & Stratos IQ164/Telestrat; website by James Groom
- Defence-Force: Oric Forums – The main Oric discussion forum
[edit] History
- Oric World – Including an online version of the book by Haworth
- Oric Atmos review – By David Scobie, Your Computer, March 1984 (text stored at the Home Computer Hall of Fame)
- Microtan 65 – Oric-1 – Oric Atmos – At the Old Computers Museum
[edit] Emulators
- Emulators – Links to up-to-date versions of Euphoric, Amoric, Atoric, Arcoric and Mess emulators
[edit] Other
- Defence-Force: Oric page – By Mickaël Pointier
