Tangerine Computer Systems
Encyclopedia
British
microcomputer
company Tangerine Computer Systems was 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 for most of the 1980s 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 ROM
s. 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 a company who never built it.
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
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 different 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. Error-checking of recorded programs was bugged, frequently causing user-created programs to fail when loaded back in. A nice feature was an almost standard (except for the connector) Centronics printer interface.
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.
The Prestel adaptor produced by Eureaka (Informatika) was the first adaptor produced for the Oric 1 and Atmos computers. However this adaptor was only furnished with very limited software, which was not suitable for the market at that specific moment in time. John Henry Patrick Rushton was rumoured to have hacked the circuit -by meticulously removing the 'security compressed resin' surrounding the circuit board- and apparently discovering the 6522
and its workings. It is also believed that this is why he had taught himself 6502 Assembly Language (for the purpose of writing the necessary software, that a local software-house had refused to write for him, when requested). It was then. In 1983, that the first fully comprehensive communications software for both the Oric 1 and Oric Atmos was produced (Oricoms and Atcoms - Distributed by FGC Publications of Euxton, Preston, U.K.). This software, entirely designed and written by John Henry Patrick Rushton and the accompanying manual ( which was written by Trevor F Shaw) - both of Telford
, Shropshire
- utilised the 6522
ACIA (Asynchronous Communications Interface Adaptor which served as a I/O port controller for the 6502 family of microprocessors). This software (the first of its type for the Oric series of computers and was indeed one of the early pioneers of home computer communications) enabled the Oric 1 and Atmos to communicate with Prestel
(a fore-runner of the Internet-which used Ceefax
style graphics), with Bulletin Boards
and facilitated the transfer of files from one Oric/Atmos to another, via the public telephone system. The transfer speeds being either 300 or 1200 baud
(this could occur at both full and half duplex). J H P Rushton was later - in the spring of 1984- to produce the first (for the Oric 1 and Atmos) 'true' high resolution Computer Aided Design utilities (C.A.D.) known as Oricad and Atcad respectively.
On the 13th 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; And 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. It was about this time, too, that Tansoft upped sticks and moved to co-exist with Oric Research at the Techno Park, Cambridge.
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. The faulty tape error checking routine was still there. Soon after the Atmos was released, the modem
, printer
and 3.5 -inch floppy disk drive originally promised for the Oric-1 were announced and released by the end of 1984. A short time after the release of the Atmos machine, a modification for the Oric-1 was issued and advertised in magazines and bulletin boards. This modification enabled the Oric-1 user to add a second rom (containing the Oric Atmos system) to a spare rom socket on the Oric-1 circuit board. Then, using a basic DPST (double pole single toggle) switch, the users could then switch between the new Oric Atmos rom and the original Oric-1 rom at their leisure.
-compatible computer. On February 1 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.
. They were Atmos based, the only difference being the logo indicating Oric Nova 64 instead of Oric Atmos 48k. Nova had 64K of RAM, 16K of which was masked by the ROM at startup, leaving 48K to work with the BASIC
language.
A Bulgarian machine called the Pravetz 8D
was produced between 1985 and 1991. The Pravetz is entirely hardware and software compatible with the Oric Atmos. The biggest change on the hardware side is the larger 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, while 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, were created in 1987-1988 by Borislav Zahariev.
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
microcomputer
Microcomputer
A microcomputer is a computer with a microprocessor as its central processing unit. They are physically small compared to mainframe and minicomputers...
company Tangerine Computer Systems was founded in 1979 by Dr. Paul Johnson, Mark Rainer and Nigel Penton Tilbury in St. Ives
St Ives, Cambridgeshire
St Ives is a market town in Cambridgeshire, England, around north-west of the city of Cambridge and north of London. It lies within the historic county boundaries of Huntingdonshire.-History:...
, Cambridgeshire
Cambridgeshire
Cambridgeshire is a county in England, bordering Lincolnshire to the north, Norfolk to the northeast, Suffolk to the east, Essex and Hertfordshire to the south, and Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire to the west...
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
Ely, Cambridgeshire
Ely is a cathedral city in Cambridgeshire, England, 14 miles north-northeast of Cambridge and about by road from London. It is built on a Lower Greensand island, which at a maximum elevation of is the highest land in the Fens...
, Cambridgeshire
Cambridgeshire
Cambridgeshire is a county in England, bordering Lincolnshire to the north, Norfolk to the northeast, Suffolk to the east, Essex and Hertfordshire to the south, and Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire to the west...
. The company was later renamed, and was known for most of the 1980s as Oric Products International.
Microtan 65
MOS Technology 6502
The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch for MOS Technology in 1975. When it was introduced, it was the least expensive full-featured microprocessor on the market by a considerable margin, costing less than one-sixth the price of...
-based kit computers, the Microtan 65
Tangerine MICROTAN 65
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 had similar keyboard...
. It had a 3U
Rack unit
A rack unit or U is a unit of measure used to describe the height of equipment intended for mounting in a 19-inch rack or a 23-inch rack...
form factor, a small amount of memory (RAM), a video character generator and UHF modulator
RF modulator
An RF modulator is a device that takes a baseband input signal and outputs a radio frequency-modulated signal....
for use with a TV
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
set, and a simple latch for entering hex
Hexadecimal
In mathematics and computer science, hexadecimal is a positional numeral system with a radix, or base, of 16. It uses sixteen distinct symbols, most often the symbols 0–9 to represent values zero to nine, and A, B, C, D, E, F to represent values ten to fifteen...
data from a keypad, and the computer was designed to be expandable. The manual came with a one-kilobyte
Kilobyte
The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Although the prefix kilo- means 1000, the term kilobyte and symbol KB have historically been used to refer to either 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes, dependent upon context, in the fields of computer science and information...
listing of Conway's Game of Life
Conway's Game of Life
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970....
. An optional expansion board could be built with a UART, more memory and BASIC ROM
Read-only memory
Read-only memory is a class of storage medium used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM cannot be modified, or can be modified only slowly or with difficulty, so it is mainly used to distribute firmware .In its strictest sense, ROM refers only...
s. Additional expansion boards became available later, offering more RAM, dedicated serial and parallel I/O
Input/output
In computing, input/output, or I/O, refers to the communication between an information processing system , and the outside world, possibly a human, or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals or data received by the system, and outputs are the signals or data sent from it...
boards, etc.
After the Microtan 65
Tangerine MICROTAN 65
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 had similar keyboard...
, 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 a company who never built it.
Oric-1
ZX Spectrum
The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd...
Tangerine's backers suggested a home computer
Home computer
Home computers were a class of microcomputers entering the market in 1977, and becoming increasingly 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 nontechnical user...
and Tangerine formed Oric Products International Ltd to develop and release the Oric-1 in 1983. Based on a 1 MHz 6502A CPU
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
, it came in 16 KB
Kilobyte
The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Although the prefix kilo- means 1000, the term kilobyte and symbol KB have historically been used to refer to either 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes, dependent upon context, in the fields of computer science and information...
or 48 KB RAM
Random-access memory
Random access memory is a form of computer data storage. Today, it takes the form of integrated circuits that allow stored data to be accessed in any order with a worst case performance of constant time. Strictly speaking, modern types of DRAM are therefore not random access, as data is read in...
variants for £
Pound sterling
The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...
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
Read-only memory
Read-only memory is a class of storage medium used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM cannot be modified, or can be modified only slowly or with difficulty, so it is mainly used to distribute firmware .In its strictest sense, ROM refers only...
containing the operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
and a modified BASIC interpreter
Interpreter (computing)
In computer science, an interpreter normally means a computer program that executes, i.e. performs, instructions written in a programming language...
.
The Oric-1 improved somewhat over the Spectrum with a different keyboard design replacing the Spectrum's renowned "dead flesh"
Chiclet keyboard
A chiclet keyboard or island-style keyboard is a computer keyboard built with an array of small, flat rectangular or lozenge-shaped rubber or plastic keys that look like erasers or "Chiclets", a brand of chewing gum manufactured in the shape of small squares with rounded corners...
one. In addition the Oric had a true sound chip
Sound chip
A sound chip is an integrated circuit designed to produce sound . It might be doing this through digital, analog or mixed-mode electronics...
, the programmable GI 8912
General Instrument AY-3-8910
The AY-3-8910 is a 3-voice Programmable Sound Generator designed by General Instrument, initially for use with their 16-bit CP1610 or one of the PIC1650 series of 8-bit microcomputers...
, and two graphical modes handled by a semi-custom ASIC
ASIC
ASIC may refer to:* Application-specific integrated circuit, an integrated circuit developed for a particular use, as opposed to a customised general-purpose device.* ASIC programming language, a dialect of BASIC...
(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
Attribute clash
Attribute clash was a display artifact caused by limits in the graphics circuitry of a number of early color 8-bit home computers, most notably the Sinclair Research ZX Spectrum, where it meant that only two colors could be used in any area of 8×8 pixels...
—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
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
RF modulator
RF modulator
An RF modulator is a device that takes a baseband input signal and outputs a radio frequency-modulated signal....
as well as RGB output and was meant to work with a basic audio tape recorder to save and load data. Error-checking of recorded programs was bugged, frequently causing user-created programs to fail when loaded back in. A nice feature was an almost standard (except for the connector) Centronics printer interface.
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
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan 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.
The Prestel adaptor produced by Eureaka (Informatika) was the first adaptor produced for the Oric 1 and Atmos computers. However this adaptor was only furnished with very limited software, which was not suitable for the market at that specific moment in time. John Henry Patrick Rushton was rumoured to have hacked the circuit -by meticulously removing the 'security compressed resin' surrounding the circuit board- and apparently discovering the 6522
MOS Technology 6522
The 6522 Versatile Interface Adapter was an integrated circuit made by MOS Technology, as well as second sources including Rockwell and Synertek. It served as a I/O port controller for the 6502 family of microprocessors, providing the parallel I/O capabilities of the PIA as well as timers and a...
and its workings. It is also believed that this is why he had taught himself 6502 Assembly Language (for the purpose of writing the necessary software, that a local software-house had refused to write for him, when requested). It was then. In 1983, that the first fully comprehensive communications software for both the Oric 1 and Oric Atmos was produced (Oricoms and Atcoms - Distributed by FGC Publications of Euxton, Preston, U.K.). This software, entirely designed and written by John Henry Patrick Rushton and the accompanying manual ( which was written by Trevor F Shaw) - both of Telford
Telford
Telford is a large new town in the borough of Telford and Wrekin and ceremonial county of Shropshire, England, approximately east of Shrewsbury, and west of Birmingham...
, Shropshire
Shropshire
Shropshire is a county in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes, the county is a NUTS 3 region and is one of four counties or unitary districts that comprise the "Shropshire and Staffordshire" NUTS 2 region. It borders Wales to the west...
- utilised the 6522
MOS Technology 6522
The 6522 Versatile Interface Adapter was an integrated circuit made by MOS Technology, as well as second sources including Rockwell and Synertek. It served as a I/O port controller for the 6502 family of microprocessors, providing the parallel I/O capabilities of the PIA as well as timers and a...
ACIA (Asynchronous Communications Interface Adaptor which served as a I/O port controller for the 6502 family of microprocessors). This software (the first of its type for the Oric series of computers and was indeed one of the early pioneers of home computer communications) enabled the Oric 1 and Atmos to communicate with Prestel
Prestel
Prestel , the brand name for the UK Post Office's Viewdata technology, was an interactive videotex system developed during the late 1970s and commercially launched in 1979...
(a fore-runner of the Internet-which used Ceefax
Ceefax
Ceefax is the BBC's teletext information service transmitted via the analogue signal, started in 1974 and will run until April 2012 for Pages from Ceefax, while the actual interactive service will run until 24 October 2012, in-line with the digital switchover.-History:During the late 60s, engineer...
style graphics), with Bulletin Boards
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
and facilitated the transfer of files from one Oric/Atmos to another, via the public telephone system. The transfer speeds being either 300 or 1200 baud
Baud
In telecommunications and electronics, baud is synonymous to symbols per second or pulses per second. It is the unit of symbol rate, also known as baud rate or modulation rate; the number of distinct symbol changes made to the transmission medium per second in a digitally modulated signal or a...
(this could occur at both full and half duplex). J H P Rushton was later - in the spring of 1984- to produce the first (for the Oric 1 and Atmos) 'true' high resolution Computer Aided Design utilities (C.A.D.) known as Oricad and Atcad respectively.
On the 13th 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; And 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. It was about this time, too, that Tansoft upped sticks and moved to co-exist with Oric Research at the Techno Park, Cambridge.
Oric Atmos
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
, printer
Computer printer
In computing, a printer is a peripheral which produces a text or graphics of documents stored in electronic form, usually on physical print media such as paper or transparencies. Many printers are primarily used as local peripherals, and are attached by a printer cable or, in most new printers, a...
and 3.5 -inch floppy disk drive originally promised for the Oric-1 were announced and released by the end of 1984. A short time after the release of the Atmos machine, a modification for the Oric-1 was issued and advertised in magazines and bulletin boards. This modification enabled the Oric-1 user to add a second rom (containing the Oric Atmos system) to a spare rom socket on the Oric-1 circuit board. Then, using a basic DPST (double pole single toggle) switch, the users could then switch between the new Oric Atmos rom and the original Oric-1 rom at their leisure.
Stratos, 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 MSXMSX
MSX was the name of a standardized home computer architecture in the 1980s conceived by Kazuhiko Nishi, then Vice-president at Microsoft Japan and Director at ASCII Corporation...
-compatible computer. On February 1 it demonstrated the Oric Stratos/IQ164 at the Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
Computer Show; on the 2nd however, Edenspring put Oric International into receivership
Receivership
In law, receivership is the situation in which an institution or enterprise is being held by a receiver, a person "placed in the custodial responsibility for the property of others, including tangible and intangible assets and rights." The receivership remedy is an equitable remedy that emerged in...
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.
Clones
A Yugoslavian company (believed to be Avtotehna, based in Ljubljana) obtained a licence to make just 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 UKUnited Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. They were Atmos based, the only difference being the logo indicating Oric Nova 64 instead of Oric Atmos 48k. Nova had 64K of RAM, 16K of which was masked by the ROM at startup, leaving 48K to work with the BASIC
BASIC
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....
language.
A Bulgarian machine called the Pravetz 8D
Pravetz series 8
Pravetz were Bulgarian computers, manufactured mainly in the town of Pravetz but also components and software were produced in Stara Zagora, Plovdiv and other.- History :...
was produced between 1985 and 1991. The Pravetz is entirely hardware and software compatible with the Oric Atmos. The biggest change on the hardware side is the larger 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, while lower case gives Cyrillic letters. In order to ease the use of the two alphabets, the Pravetz 8D is fitted with a Caps Lock
Caps lock
Caps lock is a key on many computer keyboards. Pressing it sets an input mode in which typed letters are uppercase by default. The keyboard remains in caps lock mode until the key is pressed again...
key. A Disk II
Disk II
The Disk II Floppy Disk Subsystem was a 5¼-inch floppy disk drive designed by Steve Wozniak and manufactured by Apple Computer. It was first introduced in 1978 at a retail price of US$495 for pre-order; it was later sold for $595 including the controller card and cable...
compatible interface and a custom DOS, called DOS-8D, were created in 1987-1988 by Borislav Zahariev.
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
- Oric games – specialised for games (tests & forums)
History
- Oric World – Including an online version of the book by Haworth
- Oric Atmos review – By David Scobie, Your ComputerYour Computer (British magazine)Your Computer was a British computer magazine published monthly from 1981 to 1988, and aimed at the burgeoning home computer market. At one stage it was, in its own words, "Britain's biggest selling home computer magazine". It offered support across a wide range of computer formats, and included...
, March 1984 (text stored at the Home Computer Hall of Fame) - Microtan 65 – Oric-1 – Oric Atmos – At the Old Computers Museum
- Oric Nova - licenced machine, exact copy of Atmos, at the Old Computers Museum
- Pravetz 8D - the only clone of Oric, at the Old Computers Museum
Emulators
- Emulators – Links to up-to-date versions of Euphoric, Amoric, Atoric, Arcoric and Mess emulators
- Oricutron - A new multiplatform Oric emulator
Other
- Defence-Force: Oric page – By Mickaël Pointier