Five Rare British Micro Computers - Show & Tell

this episode is supported by monster joysticks calm level up your Raspberry Pi with our all-in-one arcade kit using genuine San where arcade parts and one click print comm for your photos on canvas acrylic gifts and more local craftsman and global delivery LNK planners welcome to the cave today we've got a real treat for you it's a flight of really rare British micros to whet your appetite we're gonna take a quick look at all of them and perhaps if there's anything you see that you want to see more in depth then we can do that in a future episode and when I say we we're joined today by Keith from the digital orphanage hello Niall hello Keith thank you for joining us where did these machines come from today well Neil these machines came from the Museum of computing in Swindon and they didn't come from display I went down into the stores and found sums that we could look at today right they have to blow a little bit of dust off of a few of them did you a little bit of dynasty yes well we've got a lot of machines to cover today so we're gonna grab the first one now and what we do is we'll give you a little voice over to give you about all the facts a fact attack if you like and some sexy shots and then we'll give you our feedback and in many cases here it's gonna be our our first impressions because our families I think it's fair to say made normal choices it made more sensible choices yes so we had plenty of strides in the spectrums and the Commodores back in the day not these machines so it's really gonna be fascinating to get our hands on these and have a look at them let's grab the first machine if you don't mind Keith our first micro is the mimetic mdx 512 this was the creation of robert Branton and Jeff Boyd who met in Oxford which alongside Cambridge was a melting pot of Technology ideas and spawned many computer startups in the 80s meme' Tech built its war chest making peripherals for the sinclair zx81 memory expansions were particularly popular but when sinclair started releasing machines with more RAM on board they turned their attention to building their own micro which released in 1983 and what a looker it is brushed aluminium is the order of the day and it looks as good today as it did 37 years ago if you think it looks familiar and you're not sure why it's the machine that was used in the movie weird science to hack into the Pentagon inside the 5:12 we find 64k of ram the lesser MTX 500 has 32 KS standard which could be extended to a whopping 768 K and this 24 K of ROM the cpu is a zilog z80 a running at 4 megahertz and dedicated chips for video and sound by Texas Instruments Komplete a speck that's not dissimilar to the MSX standard of micros which appeared in this year Porter plentiful include in various video outputs because set port 2 joystick ports parallel ports and a cartridge slot on the side with space internally for an optional communications board for 2 rs-232 interfaces and a disk drive bus [Music] so here it is the memo tech MTX 512 my first impression is that this is a weighty beautiful looking machine with that brush down a minion mm-hmm do you like the style I do it's something that I mean this is what 30 odd years old and it still looks brand-new yeah no no retro brighting needed here yeah it does look mint doesn't it and I don't think any special care or attention has had to be taken to keep it in that that way I'd like to think that ba Baracus would sit down and use this it's definitely got the 18 stripe along it hasn't it oh yeah there's an influence there and just the way it's labeled if we look on the back it's not UHF or anything like that it's a monitor out it's it's not audio it's HiFi it's everything is designed to kind of look a bit more premium then say it's competition as their decks spectrum and it does sit that's why we've got the BBC microwave over here in terms of performance and price it really does hit between the two doesn't it it's got the sort of premium feel that the BBC had it could do some damage with that ahem now there's an interesting story behind this because the British government did invest a million pounds into mo tech to help with the development of this machine and it failed which is why it's a lesser-known machine it flopped and as a result of that failure the British government then pulled out completely any future funding to Sinclair to acorn to anyone else they just said we've had enough of microcomputers so this could be to blame for the end British investment in hickory computers that's a hell of a legacy to me what could have been could have been well yeah it's a lovely machine and that is one that I would love to add to my collection so if you like the look of this machine do you want to see a full episode on this let us know in the comments I want to see you on so you look at the next micro Keith we shout yes the ORAC one this is one of three machines that used the ORAC name Brandon used by tangerine computer systems for their home micro range the catalyst for which like most was the success of Sinclair's computers they wanted a piece of the action and shared their machine with the world in 1982 like Sinclair's computers it's clearly built to a tight budget with a chiclet keyboard a simple molded plastic design and a few ports on the rear therefore the cassette tape there's a printer port RF out and an expansion port but rather nicely also there's an RGB video output looks can be deceptive the keyboard overhangs the size of the system board which is evident when we turn it over and see a speaker grille which emitted sound generated by an a Y sound chip and that's a point scored over the original Zed expect from design the a Y chip was added to that range later in its life inside we find the other popular CPU of the 80s the Maus technology 6502 a Brennan at one megahertz as found in the BBC micro Commodore 64 and many others two models of the ORAC one were available one with 16 K and the other with 48 k of RAM and both had 16 K of ROM which housed a Microsoft flavoured basic - the final issue full board produced and the ROM comprises of two ICS with Mitsubishi branded labels on them do take note of that for the next machine that we'll be looking at it's compact neat and nicely laid out as you'd expect from a company with the experience of tangerine but was it actually any good so when it comes to the aurochs world I'm actually lucky enough to have my own boxed one here it's not bad condition do you remember seeing this box on the shelves cuz I certainly don't there's a bit before my shopping time no no no it's a nice box it's nicely presented what does it offer us was he promising us there well it's promising not just ordinary styling but superb superb styling yes full graphics and real sound and tele Tex Tex yes tele tech from V data and a professional keyboard now I'm dubious about the professional keyboard just from looking at the picture of it so let's get out the bomb ski tomorrow night there it is so this would have cost you 129 pounds for a 16 K version 169 pound for a 48 K rodents so similar kind of setup as the 16 or 48 k Sinclair ZX Spectrum again this this will keep coming up because it was so popular this was the one that set the trend there wasn't a yeah there's a Tex 1881 and then things exploded with the ZX Spectrum in terms of sales and sometimes technically so the ORAC one was made by a company called tangerine and they had a mission go back to 1979 with the micro town shall we try and put it down without squeaking and annoying everyone with that I'm sorry everyone's is and tangerine bought out the micro town that was a self-build computer in 1979 6502 based I think it was so they had experience and they were watching from the sidelines and they saw the sales of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and just had to bring out the Machine themselves and here it is the first thing that really strikes me is is whenever I saw pictures of this I always assumed it was the same size as a ZX Spectrum hmm it does on all the photos because there's nothing else to scale no so if you put that mixer there's a spectrum you can see that it's actually we keep all of cyrene um it's actually quite quite a lot bigger isn't it hmm yeah it's much bigger which means that although it's kind of spongy horrible chiclet keyboard there's more room and less room for error there's more room for your fingers less room for error to the dead flesh of this headache spectrum it's still a horrible keyboard let's be honest but I had lice horrible much I'd like these small thin yeah yeah was it successful anywhere well they did sound quite a few in the UK for a short period of time and they sold things for my 50,000 in France and that was apparently for a short space of time the most popular one in France oh really okay because the French in the 8-bit era they really took to the Amstrad didn't they yeah I'm strange of computers so they sold really well I do know for a fact that France well NAB designer and programmer behind Stas and Amos you may have heard of those programs when I interviewed him and it was the first computer that he had a game published on again called driver so it bought him some success and he raves about it he loves the ORAC one so there are some fans out there of the machine now it's well known that it was bought out specifically to compete with the ZX Spectrum are there any other improvements that it has over the specky it's got better sound so it's got stereo saying I believe it's the same chip as in our beloved Amstrad CPC the aey chip so it actually has a sound chip of compared to the spec is beep err although the later spectrums did have a sound chip any other differences is this different CPU isn't it it's 6502 running at one megahertz compared to the three-and-a-half megahertz is at eighty different processors so it's hard to give a direct comparison on megahertz alone there's a lot of things I've read with which said that 6502 was a faster processor than that eighty looks like oh right okay so I imagine they would have had pretty similar performance just based on the CPM alone and then of course the specky was famous for its color clash we have the same problem on the ORAC yes but to a lesser degree instead of an 8x8 grid of pixels that you can have your colors in it's got a six by one right okay so the color clash the attribute clash was still there I think you had two resolutions as well a higher text-only and a higher resolution yes so in the high res is the one that's got the six point one so there we go that's the ORAC one it it's less sexy than the MTX isn't it I think we're gonna struggle to find a better looking a mutant in the MTX today but it's got its own charm you know I can see if we compare it to another French computer over here sorry this is not French computer another computer that was popular in France but it's got a same charm if we compare it to another computer from France targeting the French market specifically in lipstick red you know it's got it's got a kind of nicest ie and I can see why the French would take to the styling if they took to this if this is what was what French computing was all about in the 80s then I can see why they might like the ORAC one it's got a strange sort of overhang effect so the actual computer part is probably around the same size as the spectrum it is actually isn't happen okay that's same size and then they felt about the ergonomics of it by making it a wedge shape so that the keyboard is slightly at a slam that's nice right the ORAC story doesn't stop here because although this didn't sell wildly it was successful enough to attract investment to tangerine and to get them to build another computer which is the next one we're gonna look at now so let's put this away and grab the next machine the ORAC Atmos arrived in 1984 it's that difficult second album for the band who wanted to build on its modest success on the face of it it's a promising start a good-looking and usable keyboard replaces the chiclet keys and the color scheme is really very attractive that wedge shape and compact 57 key keyboard with no numeric keypad kind of reminds me of an amiga 600 when using basic this keyboard can type full commands at the touch of a single key just like in Sinclair's basic but this can also be disabled so you can type everything in full which is my preference I have to say and there's a false speaker grille on the top of the case and apparently this is where the redesigned board would see the speaker relocated to but that just didn't happen why not well let's look inside and we'll see what vast improvements have been made over the ORAC one in this the Atmos yes that's right absolutely nothing has changed in fact this is an issue three board which is an earlier revision than the board I had in my auric one the spec is the same it's the same damn machine there are some minor differences though our two ROM chips have been consolidated into one and that ROM is a version 1.1 ROM which squashes various bugs that were found in the original ROM and add some new commands it is entirely possible to add this ROM to your auric one but the difference is in the roms does break compatibility with some programs so a rom switcher was sometimes installed by enthusiasts later titles would have software for the 1.0 rom on one side of the tape and 1.1 on the other to simplify things the Atmos then was less of a new computer and more of a tweak to bring out the best in the machine so here's our next machine and I was dwelling a little bit on the styling of the last one and showing you this French one because I think that perhaps they were influenced by that little bit of success they had in the French market and you can see in the design of the follow-up the ORAC Atmos you've got these we've gone to a black shell with red keys and red trim and styling I think it looks actually quite a lot better than the original Eric one and they've done away with all the claims on this box he's not telling us his real sound and full graphics it's just showing the machine itself and I think that works I think it does too and there's an interesting label over there what's that all about so it's two labels quite confusing because it says it's got 48 K which is the same as the ORAC one but they also make a big thing about contains 64 K around okay and apparently that's because in both of these they found it easier to put eight 8k RAM chips right one Ram chip for each of the data lines but because there's only 64 K addressable and the roms got to take up some of that room that they just dropped 16 K and use the Raman plate should we pop out the box I never look at it all squeaking you can see that's actually in mint condition because it's still got this protective film so many people that would just liked it just appeal should we do it yeah lovely looking machine so size wise is the same exactly I think it's it I think it's come out of the same mold same kind of wedge otherwise is it even got the same pinching no no so the top is different at the bottom yeah you can see it's an identical machine underneath same MO and at the back the same ports exactly the same ports so they've just changed the top half to give it a proper keyboard which I applaud I think that's nice I think that's a really good looking machine if I bought this would I have been disappointed if I already ended an ORAC one the upgraded ROM in this one was made available to drop into here right but you'd have to fit a switch so that you could flip between them because the software would would have been different right so the hardware was that similar that you can just put the the Atmos ROM in to the Arak one same TPU same Ram mm-hmm has the same machine there yeah and then when you bought the games on cassette on one side would be the atmosphere another one would be the ark one version but well you know you could put the same ROM chip in there and just fit between them yeah so I think I would have been disappointed I'm in the key I would have wanted that for the keyboard but you know I would have been disappointed if I got out and spent a lot of money again for what is essentially a keyboard upgrade they're like six six foreigners maybe wonder if you could take the top off and put on to have that keyboard and there's also a switch in the box what's that all about yes this caught my eye this obviously didn't come with it and I'm wondering whether maybe Howard do some he thought I need a switch oh that's attached to the pair ply break here so they've made their own costume they've made their own because there's nothing obvious unit sir as with many of these at the time there was no on/off switch you just pulled the plug on or switched off at the wall but somebody's decided that's nice because it shows that the machine was clearly used even though it's got the protective film on so they've looked after it very well good well that's the the ORAC journey where should we go next we'll grab something else from the pile I feel Sinclair Sinclair okay let's get with the Sinclair machine Lex let's see what we've got now this really is a standout machine in the history of home micros not for its performance or its build quality but for its price a sub 100 pounds or 200 US dollars microcomputer in January 1980 and if you had a soldering iron you were looking at just 17 9 pounds 95 for the kids we are an awfully long way from that metal case of the MTX machine now a plastic case with plastic rivets and a membrane keyboard it would get damaged it would overheat and it could be unreliable but it was under a hundred pounds at its heart is a Zed 80 cpu running at three one two five megahertz just 1k of RAM which is where Momo tech saw that gap in the market for Ram expansions and well very little else the RAM doubled his video memory yes 1k for your programs and display which was black and white and character based the minimal video circuitry meant a picture was only updated when the machine was idling so it would flash when the CPU was doing something else like registering a key press but did I mention it was cheap and that CPU was quite fast compared to the competition with 50,000 sales it woke in industry up in the UK and lit the touchpaper of home computer ownership on our shores okay so admittedly this is not as rare as some of the other computers were looking at it's certainly old it dates back to 1980 this is the zx80 if you want to take you out of this squeaky box and I love just how some of the computers come to us in the museum you can see and written definitely in there and though it's not as rare it's a really important machine in the history of computing isn't it British computing it's the machine that Sir Clive Sinclair really used to drive down price and and make it affordable can you remember how much this one cost this was about 80 pound as a kit right okay could you buy a prebuilt I think you could yes but a lot of people were still buying machines as kits then and it was it was almost debatable as to whether it should be called a computer and I at the time internally this is what I've read from what what the team were discussing because it couldn't perform floating-point computations I wasn't until the later the follow up the next year there's EDX 81 that that was really high on the priority for it to be able to do floating-point calculations but I disagree it is a computer turn 3 they're very similar machines and the floating-point was in the ROM anyway so you could add that back the styling tell us about the styling kids because there's an interesting feature you mentioned earlier on the top there so I had as that X 81 and that was my introduction to computers and because I have the magazine's I always used to see this as well and I always used to think this was a nice little exhaust port on the top with a nice grill and it's just hated all dated yeah but the thing that strikes me about this is just how fragile it looks it's so thin it's like if you stepped on that you just snap the keyboard off a keyboard that is effectively a sticker it's actually peeling at the edge there and oh well the interesting thing is this is all part of the same circuit board right so the keyboard is membrane is on the circuit board that the rest of the computers on and then you've just got this lid effectively with these plastic things yes it's just just squash together and the agrestic rivets it with rivers you can take those off so you can get inside but it does have a very cheap feel to it hmm and the competition at the time in terms of kit and pre-built machines that were coming out in 1980 the the big one that came out to compete with it was the a corner atom which we talked about recently and the BBC micro series and you'll see the styling of this it's not quite as big but it's a very similar industrial design to the BBC micro and it's got a proper keyboard on it you can see the lineage between that and the later Micra and the micro and indeed with that with these at xat we went to the zx81 we I often mention the horrible dead flesh keyboard on the ZX Sinclair ZX Spectrum but it's amazing in comparison to this I used to type on this and and I have the additional overlay but you could buy complete kits to put the whole of this into a completely different you know with the proper keyboard and everything yeah everything everything about these was all about driving down price yeah it's evident in the styling but as a result of that it's quite iconic in its styling there's almost an element of like retro-futurism about it yes it's almost circu brick almost 9 2001 and I wish I'd been able to get the one that the display cabinet because that's a nice white version yeah this is you can get an idea of what it should look like underneath yo for a lot of us here that is where it started not a rare machine but a really important machine but the next machine we're going to go to now is certainly one that you don't see very much of the only one I've ever seen before is behind the glass cabinet so now I get to get my hands on it so let's have a look at the next machine Keith it's the turn now of the enterprise one to eight which hit shops in 1985 but it was announced two years earlier in 83 and that's a lifetime in technology terms they came in two flavors the enterprise 64 and one to eight with 64 and 128 K of RAM respectively the rest was the same including the colorful styling and that unmissable built-in joystick a balance of features and cost-cutting has been struck with a wealth of expansion holes rather than ports because most of the time they're just exposing the system board and the keyboard and case plastics are very Goldilocks not too cheap not too fancy but the overall look is very pleasing with a hint of Amstrad in the color scheme and the quality's not too bad it standout features are that whopping 128k of ram or it would have been if released in 1983 and a four megahertz said eighty cpu supported by a success Nick handled graphics and Dave the sound and memory bank switching to allow that said 82 access the full 128 K the custom chips offered a range of video modes with up to 256 colors which could be mixed and display multiple resolutions and palettes on different parts of the screen at once and that sound chip was pretty good with three channels and a noise channel and effects such as ring modulation also seen in the famous sid chip on the c64 overall this looks to be a very capable all-rounder with some really nice features [Music] okay Keith this is our final machine for the day what have you got for us well captain we've got the enterprise the enterprise beam me up the first impression that yeah the first thing that I think about is Amstrad CPC because of the coloring of the keys quick glance the green the blue the red it's all the same and then the second thing you notice is it's got a joystick built into the damn case joystick or gearstick rig is it looks a bit like a gear yeah so that is where your cursor keys would normally be so that's replacing the cursor keys now we've got to talk about the spec of this machine because if it had come out in 1983 when it was announced it would have been a beast and it was taking pretty powerful when it came out in 1985 and that was down to the fact that it used custom acid chips to offload certain features from the CPU for example the video and the sound chip which was called Dave brilliantly it's up there with Gary in the Amiga but just tell us about the basic specs what did we have in here came in two models we've got 64 K model and a 1/2 8k hmm and it's got a 4 megahertz Zed 80 little bit faster than there's an expectorant and quite a lot of RAM 1985 I guess the Amstrad CPC six one to eight was coming out by then with a 28 K around it was taken if it was 1983 it would have been a monster but I like the style of it and it's got some nice outputs on the back inputs and outputs some of them are a little bit cheaply done they've opted for exposing the board rather than is that any difference with the angst Ralph no and you've got things like the expansion on the spec it's just a board that you plug things into but despite the cheapness of the sockets you have got I think there's a monitor output there somewhere in there there's RGB out somewhere here one of the edge connectors there it is so you've got RGB out you a couple of joysticks printer serial port 2 cassette interfaces and an RF output with a channel switcher which I don't know if that's supposed to be stuck in or if that was for the American market but it certainly gives you plenty of options it's even good is that a power switch no it's a reset switch and the back rom slot slot expansion Bay on the side I could then increase your girth increase your gear who doesn't want to do that and then the function keys could always leave me customize their use they just named function 1 to 18 with a little low up little slap where you could put yeah I know if you don't have flight sim or a word processor what do you like to like have I mentioned I like like Tim's game oh you didn't I'm not sure about that that I think that has gotta be a weak point I think I would have snapped that in a day pull up but I think that's a really nice machine serial number one 604 of 80,000 which sold and when the writing was on the wall I think the last 20,000 went to Hungary you could imagine just what it would have been like in the board room when Armstrong released the four six four six one two eight you know they stole their March yeah yeah the four six four costless came with a monitor had a built-in cassette deck so it kind of rendered this redundant for all of his extra fancy chips when it had going on in there I don't think he ever really took hold so that certainly is one of the rarer british micros and a very distinctive one at that I like the look of it so I hope you enjoyed our Whistlestop tour of rare some not so rare but interesting I think they were really interesting British micros which may have not have been seen it in other parts of the world I'm gonna pick out a favorite and it's the one we saw at the race start based on styling alone is gonna be the MT X 512 for me styling weight self-defense capabilities it's it's a lovely machine I've got to get one for the game imagine if I find one the postage cost alone will probably exceed the person per machine or that they do go from money actually I've seen them up around 500 pounds money how about you is that one that stands up for you well I do like this one as well but I think I'm going to go with the enterprise enterprise good choice good choice of captain I hope you've enjoyed looking at them if there's anything you want to see more of them do let us know in the comment section and we can make that happen either here or on Keith's channel here I recommend you going subscribe to he's closing in on a thousand subscribers so let's try and make that happen for Keith and of course I mentioned to the Swindon Museum of computing who have been kind enough to lend us these machines I'll put a link to their website down below I'm on their social media and everything else don't do if you're ever in the area go and check out their Museum and I just say there's one gap that I'd love to see filled here and in my own collection and an honorable mention has to go to the Sam Kupang computer which I know they've got another museum that is on display and people are looking at that we couldn't take it away today so hopefully one day we'll get a salmon coupe a I was tempted I was temperature lovely lovely machines so we'll look at that in the future so as always thank you Keith for coming to join us thank you everyone for watching and take care the light [Music] if you enjoy my content and would like to support the cave while receiving a completely at free experience and access to releases one week before they go public then visit patreon.com forward slash retro man cave and join the official cave dwellers thank you for your support [Music] you [Music]

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 70,703

Rating: 4.9351788 out of 5

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Id: RQeEO7d1DWw

Length: 31min 19sec (1879 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2020