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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 were known in most of the 1980s as Oric International.

Contents 1 An early 6502 machine: the Microtan 65 2 The Oric-1 3 The Atmos 4 The Stratos, the Telestrat, and The end 5 Notes 6 References 7 External links

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, a video character generator, and a simple latch for entering hex data from a keypad. The majority of the chips were not socketed, which led to all sorts of hardware debugging issues. The manual came with a one-kilobyte listing of Conway's Game of Life. An optional expansion board could be built with UART, for keyboard, more memory and BASIC ROMs.

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.

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 variants for £129 and £169 respectively, matching the prices and models available for the popular Spectrum. 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 reknowned "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 needing to colour eight. 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.

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.

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.

Notes

1. ^  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.

References

• Haworth, Jonathan (1992). Oric - The Story So Far. 2nd edition. Cambridge, England.

External links

• Microtan 65 – Oric-1 – Oric Atmos – At the Old Computers Museum
• Oric World – Including an online version of the book by Haworth
• The Oric FAQ – For Microtan 65, Oric 1, Oric Atmos & Stratos IQ164/Telestrat; website by James Groom
• Defence-Force: Oric page – By Mickaël Pointier
• Oric Atmos review – By David Scobie, Your Computer, March 1984 (text stored at the Home Computer Hall of Fame)

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