The Oric-1 is 30

After all this time, there are still people making new stuff for it..

There is still a very dedicated following, and they even produce new software for the Oric. Have some nice links.

http://space1999.defence-force.org/

http://oric30years.defence-force.org/index?page=main

Definitely not a dead platform here. I've also met a couple of them in the past, nice people too.

Name?

"the Oric - the name, conjured up by Tullis from a partial anagram of ‘micro’"

Was it not taken from Orac, the supercomputer with a 'personality' of Blake's 7 fame?

Awful design though. A tape CRC routine that didn't work, a power on initialisation process that was massively timing critical (you're supposed to let the PSU warm up a little first before plugging it into the computer). Lots of errata and modifications for stability.

I have one sitting about waiting to be fixed for a friend but I never seem to get around to doing it.

I remember them well

My best friend at school had one of these. I remember the many minutes waiting for Manic Minor to load. The sound quality from the Oric was very good, particularly the hall of the mountain king and the blue danube.

No complaints about the serial attributes?

My understanding of the standard Oric conversation is that somebody has to point out that...

When the ULA scans a video byte it's either an instruction to change the current two-colour palette or to output pixels. The net effect is that you have to leave a gap anywhere you want to change output colours. Teletext did a similar thing but got away with it because words naturally have gaps between them. Video memory was more compact but it was very hard to write multicolour games when compared to the other micros of the day.

(and access to the sound chip was only through the versatile interface adaptor, which was a further pain)

Ah, them were the days...

A nice trip down Memory (hah) Lane for me, too.

In 1978-80 I was transitioning from programmable calculators (PCW published my AI-like Noughts & Crosses program for the Casio fx502p) into computers and after a false start I ended up with the TI-99/4 (the chicklet keyboard precursor to the 4A, that in the UK came with a modified Skantic TV as a monitor) after selling my soul financially...

I remember the UK101, the Rockwell AIM65, and the excitement that "hobby" computing generated in the UK - it was a real compute-by-the-seat-of-your-pants time. All those ingenious tricks to reduce the size of programs - like LET A = SGN(PI) instead of LET A = 1 for the Sinclair - and the mean trick of turning a QL upside down to see if all the key caps fell off...

I ran a TI-99 group back then, and friends I made through using the TI in the early 1980s I still correspond with today. I got into a bunch of things including investigative journalism (even wrote a book on the TI) and eventually moved from working in an NHS research lab into what wasn't even called IT back then.

Almost 35 years later I don't regret one moment. It's been a blast.

Ahh the Oric

I had one briefly before upgrading to a C64... its an interesting machine...

Many years later, I wrote an emulator for it entirely from scratch, just for something to do on my train journey to work...

http://code.google.com/p/oriculator

All three machines and others of the time, Johnson maintains, contain TV-out circuitry inspired by his pioneering work on the Microtan.

Cite? Everybody at the time just used an Astec modulator. The Microtan-65 photo even shows exactly that.

According to Paul Johnson, the ULA was originally created as a TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic) integrated circuit.

Some confusion in this paragraph - the ULA emulator would have been a PCB with discrete TTL devices on it. The quote at the end of the paragraph doesn't make any sense.

I think Barry Muncaster was being a little disingenuous with this one:

“The 16K Oric [was] exactly the same design as the 48K Oric,” said Muncaster. “We would have had no problems if the specification of a particular chip had not altered just prior to manufacture. However, it did, which resulted in us having to change the 16K circuit board. This has meant a 12-week delay in production.”

The only thing that could have caused a 12-week delay would have a ULA re-spin. So, was it Tangerine's own spec alteration that caused the problem?

Were they rubbish?

I had a 16k one, still have it boxed in the loft. I waited six months for it to be delivered then used it loads ...

I wrote loads of stuff in BASIC that could now be used as great examples of bad programming but I'd migrated from a ZX81 (which I hated and was almost impossible to use sensibly). I learned how to program (sort of) I learned assembler (sort of) and I learned how the hardware integrated with the firmware ... At that time I programmed the Oric-1 or I tried to get time on the 380Z and it's (black and white) basicsg interpreter at school ... the Oric inevitably won.

Clunky and made of plastic it might have been but it worked and, most importantly, I could afford it ...

and you can make toasted cheese sammies on the case...

The "original" Microtan seems to have twice as many RAM chips as the Speccy boards I've seen.

http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/images/speci1pcb-s.jpg is a pic of an issue 1, original Sinclair Spectrum.

I can only imagine the energy savings to anyone running one of THOSE in winter....

I owned the larger-cased but still-a-Speccy Timex/Sinclair 2068, which was one hell of a box for the time, had Turtle graphics, a ROM cartridge slot, and everything but a floppy drive control port...

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/timex/tc2068si.jpg

which might have been enough to help Timex Computer Company do some sales damage to its nearest competitor HERE, the Commodore. But Timex bailed before they could find out and went back to having automated BP cuffs, alarm clocks and other, more salable kitsch made for them in Korea.

Cuthbert

And all the Cuthbert games !!!!!