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The Eighties was without doubt the age of the home computer. Now we might just be limited to two real choices for a computer in the home (either a PC or an Apple Mac) but back then there were more different computer systems available than you could shake a stick at.
For most of the Eighties, in the UK at least, there were four main contenders – the Commodore 64, the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC and the BBC Micro – but there were many more besides including the Dragon 32, the ZX81, the Vic-20 and today’s spotlighted machine, the Oric-1.
The Oric-1 was created by UK computer firm Tangerine Computer Systems, although it was marketed under the company name of Oric Products International. It was aimed fair and square at the ZX Spectrum end of the market, as it was of a similar size and shape, and came in both 16K and 48K versions, just like the Spectrum did, and was even sold for just about the same price.
It did also improve on the Spectrum in many ways too. First it had a better keyboard than the original Spectrum (although that wasn’t really that hard an achievement!) although it has to be said the keys were a lot smaller in size. It had better sound capabilities and a higher resolution screen too.
One thing it did keep in common with the Spectrum though was an unreliable method of loading and saving programs, that being a standard cassette tape recorder.
The Oric-1 hit the market in 1983 and sold over 200,000 units in the UK and France. This was enough to allow further development of the system and the following year saw the Oric Atmos born to the world.
The Oric Atmos looked like a great improvement externally, primarily due to it having a far far better keyboard than its siblings. However, whilst its operating system did see some improvements there was actually very little else to distinguish the Atmos from the Oric-1.
Whilst Oric Products did announce further systems beyond these, including the Oric Stratos and Oric Telestrat, neither really took off. The company went into liquidation the day after the Stratos was demonstrated for the first time in public, and whilst the Stratos did eventually get released under the auspices of French company Eureka, it never caught on and the Oric name became consigned to the great computer industry list of also rans.
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You know, I don’t recall the Oric computers at all (at first, I thought you meant Orac). The others I remember but not Oric.
“it had a better keyboard than the original Spectrum”
I’m sorry but the original rubbery keys on the Speccy were brilliant. And the best for games like Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. 😉
“unreliable method of loading and saving programs, that being a standard cassette tape recorder”
That was shared with most of the computers at the time – although I suppose with some you could upgrade to a floppy disc drive.
A little digging online indicates that the Oric had a faulty tape error checking routine.
I knew I’d get someone defending the Spectrum keyboard! 😉
In my experience any of the home computers which used a standard cassette deck to load and save were troublesome experiences (you might be able to tell from that comment that I was a Commodore 64 man, which had a special dedicated cassette deck) :-b
In all honesty though I didn’t mean to single out the Spectrum as being bad in any way, it was just so obviously the main inspiration behind the Oric.
I won’t, the plus/128 and +2/3 kbs are much better. I nearly bought a replacement case with proper kb for my sppectrum back in the day.
I once locked up a display Atmos in a shop in Kingston. You couldn’t do a thing with it, no idea what I did. Well apart from run away sharpish.
LOL. Those were the days, when shops thought it was enough to have the computers switched on blinking their little cursors at you and think that was enough of a demonstration of the machine.
I was a oroud owner of a 48k ZX Spectrum, can clearly remember the joy of Christmas day when I opened my presents to discover it in all it’s glory and, of course, another present of a tape recorder to hook it up to……….those were the days my friends.