Camputers Lynx (1983)

Introduced March 1983

The Camputers Lynx was a British home computer released in March 1983, slotting into the category of 1980s microcomputers which were pretty good, but not good enough to succeed. The Lynx was a relative powerful computer that boasted some impressive specifications for its time, but it failed to gain widespread popularity due to various factors, including its relatively high price and the dominance of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 in the UK home computer market.

Camputers Lynx

The Lynx was designed and manufactured by Camputers Ltd, a UK-based company that was founded in 1976 by a group of computer enthusiasts. The Lynx was the company's first and only product, and it was initially launched as a business computer. However, it was later marketed as a home computer to compete with the best-selling Spectrum and other similar computers.

Inside was a Zilog Z80 processor, which was a popular choice for home computers in the 1980s. The computer had 48KB of RAM (eventually expandable to 192 KB), plus 32KB of ROM with the operating system and BASIC interpreter. The 256 x 248 8-colour display was impressive for the time, but the Lynx’s graphics were conversely extremely slow. Audio capabilities were better than the Spectrum, but not as good as the BBC Micro or Commodore 64.

Undoubtedly, the Lynx was a good-looking machine. It was potentially a more professional system than the Spectrum, and it showed great promise overall but despite significant efforts to market the machine and many upgrades and relaunches, it probably only sold in the tens of thousands – almost all of them in the UK.

The reasons for the failure of the Lynx were also common to other rival systems. The home computer market of the 1980s was becoming very crowded, and the Lynx just didn’t have the software it needed, which combined with the quirky video meant that it wasn’t quite good enough to be a major player.

Camputers quickly failed as a business, going bust in 1984. A subsequent takeover and more than one relaunch attempt also came to nothing. Subsequently the Lynx became something of a cult system, with models in good working condition selling for hundreds of pounds.

It was a good system with its own strengths and weaknesses, but it wasn’t a GREAT system and some of its competitors were. Like the Dragon 32, it might have been a success in different circumstances. In the end it ended up on the heap of “might have been” computers that characterised the early 1980s market.

Image credit:
Retro-activity via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0

IBM PC/XT vs Compaq Portable (1983)

Introduced March 1983

The launch of the original IBM PC in 1981 cause a fundamental shift in the desktop computing market. Out of the apparent chaos of a myriad of (mostly) startup companies offering business computers came the biggest player in the market – IBM. The original PC wasn’t the best, most innovative or cheapest product on the market by a long shot, but IBM was a serious player that business had heard of and it was an immediate sales success.

The original IBM PC had some significant shortcomings, in particular there was no hard disk and the limited expansion slots filled up very quickly. The upgraded PC/XT added a 10MB hard drive as standard, plus three extra slots, more RAM (up to 640Kb) and ROM and it upgraded the storage of the floppy drive to a maximum of 360Kb.

It wasn’t a huge upgrade over the original, but it addressed the shortcomings of the previous model well. It was probably the computer that IBM should have launched to begin with, but at over $7500 at launch, the PC/XT was really expensive.

IBM PC/XT

Uniquely for IBM, the architecture of the PC was quite easy to copy. Buying in industry-standard components such as the Intel 8088 processor and making detailed hardware specifications available made it possible for other companies to make PC clones that could be better and cheaper at the same time, and Microsoft could sell you the same operating system – MS-DOS – that the PC ran to ensure compatibility. First out of the door was the Columbia MPC 1600, but more followed.

At about the same time, another trend for “luggable” all-in-one computers was starting, with the CP/M-based Kaypro II being a popular example. Texas-based Compaq Computer Corporation combined both a PC-compatible computer in the convenient form factor of a transportable machine to create the Compaq Portable, their first product.

“Portable” was a stretch, at 13 kilograms or 28 pounds it was not an easy thing to carry. Nonetheless, it could be moved easily without unplugging a vast number of cables and components. With the keyboard clipped into place, the Compaq Portable could fit into the overhead luggage compartments on a plane, or be easily placed into the boot of a car.

Compaq improved on the PC’s architecture in their own way, broadly similar to the PC/XT. There was no hard disk as standard, but users commonly added one. The Portable was also cheaper to get started with than the PC/XT. Despite being something of a niche product, the Compaq Portable sold tens of thousands of units in its first year, and it made Compaq Computer Corporation a very successful rival to IBM in the PC market.

Compaq Portable

IBM and Compaq duked it out in the market until the mid-2000s, with IBM eventually selling off its PC business to Lenovo and Compaq merging with HP.

Both machines were the ancestors of most personal computers in use today, crucially demonstrating that the PC platform could evolve over time rather than having to be completely replaced with a new model every couple of years. And although the PC/XT and Portable were not the first PCs, and now very much obsolete, they were highly significant in developing the market we see today.

Image credits:
Dmitry Brant via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
ctgreybeard via Flickr - CC BY-SA 2.0

Oric-1 (1983)

Introduced January 1983

If you were in the market for a home computer in Britain in 1983, there would typically be three models that most people would choose: the Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum or Acorn BBC Micro. There were other machines (such as the Dragon 32), and it did seem that this fast-growing market was ripe for more players.

One interested player was Tangerine Computer Systems, who had made the Microtan 65 some years earlier. Tangerine certainly had the technical skills to make a competitive machine, and seeing a gap in the market they set about creating the Oric-1 microcomputer, though a newly-formed subsidiary named Oric Products International.

Oric-1

The Oric-1 was very much aimed against the Spectrum end of the market, similarly priced and similar too in size. Based on a 6502 rather than a Z80, it was (like the Spectrum) available in 16Kb and 48Kb varieties – although a peculiarity of the hardware design meant that the latter actually had 64Kb of memory, the top 16Kb not be accessible without tinkering. The sound on the Oric was far better than on the Spectrum, using the popular AY-3-8910 chip. Four different graphics modes were available – more like the BBC than the Spectrum, and the inbuilt BASIC was pretty powerful as well. Last but not least, the chicklet keyboard had small, hard buttons which were much nicer to use than the Spectrum’s notorious “dead flesh” keyboard.

The main problem was bugs – the Oric-1’s ROM was full of them, and also the cassette interface was unreliable - which was a major problem for a home computer of the time. One other problem was that the promised peripherals – a printer interface, modem and floppy disk drive – ended up being later into production. Disappointments aside, it was a good system and sold at least a couple of hundred thousand units while it was on sale. 

Oric-1 and Oric Atmos

Oric struggled for money, but a takeover from a company called Edenspring Investments led to more money being available, leading to the improved Oric Atmos being launched in 1984. However, the home computer market was heading for a crash and Oric ended up in receivership – twice – before finally going bust in 1987. However, licensed cloned versions continued including the Bulgarian Pravetz 8D. A sad end, but of course today none of Acorn, Commodore or Sinclair are with us either so perhaps not unexpected.

Today the Oric-1 is an uncommon but collectable device, with prices for good systems being a couple of hundred pounds or so, the later Atmos commands higher prices and rarer derivatives more still. Perhaps in the end it wasn’t a significant machine, but there was

Image credits:
Rama via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0 FR
Martin Wichary via Wikimedia Commons – CC BY 2.0

Apple Lisa (1983)

Launched January 1983

In 1983 the Apple Computer Company was just seven years old, but had grown very rapidly on the back of strong sales of the Apple II. By the early 1980s though, the Apple II was looking increasingly out-of-date. In 1980 the Apple III was launched, designed to  fix many of the shortcomings of its predecessor, but it was a deeply unreliable and poorly-built product and was a sales disaster.

The launch of the IBM PC in 1981 saw Apple struggling in the business market, so it was very important that whatever they came up with next would be a success. Sadly for Apple, their next product – the Apple Lisa – ended up as another disaster, even if it did seem to hold great promise.

Apple Lisa 1

The key feature of the Lisa was the mouse-drive graphical interface, the computer unit itself was an elegant single-box design with an integrated 12 inch monitor. It looked very different in both hardware and software terms from the competition, and both the mainstream media and specialist press were very excited.

Development of the Lisa had started years earlier, at first with modest aims but quickly becoming influenced by the work that fellow Silicon Valley engineers at Xerox were doing with their Alto platform which was being developed into the Xerox Star. When Steve Jobs saw the Alto’s graphical interface he was highly impressed, and the Apple team sought to emulate and improve on it. The concepts of the mouse-driven user environment were not new - Doug Engelbart had demonstrated the concepts as far back as 1968 – but it was only really in the 1980s that computer hardware started to become affordable enough to make it a reality.

The mouse was still a novelty when the Apple Lisa was launched, as this cover from Personal Computer World shows

Unlike previous Apple models which were based on the 6502, the Lisa was built around a Motorola 68000, clocked at 5MHz along with one megabyte of RAM. Neither the CPU nor RAM were very fast, even by 1983 standards. The display was a 720 x 364 pixel black-and-white unit with no greyscale capabilities. Twin 5.25-inch variable speed floppy drives (known by the name “Twiggy”) offered a lot of storage, but were very unreliable. The Lisa was also designed to be used with a 5MB external hard drive, and a variety of printers were available.

The look and feel of the operating system was far in advance of everything outside of Xerox’s labs. Based largely around the file manager, it became the template for the OS used on the later Macintosh. A crude form of protected memory was available, but overall the operating system ran sluggishly on the hardware. The Lisa had a variety of office applications available, including a word processor, spreadsheet, graphical applications and utilities.

This may all sound very familiar because the Macintosh, launched a year later, also did many of the things that the Lisa did. But the Lisa is not the Mac’s predecessor, instead this ended up as a dead end which cost Apple a lot of money. Not only was the hardware and software unstable, but the price of the Lisa started at an eye-watering $9,995 in 1983 money (around $30,000 today). Any appeal that the Lisa may have had was undermined by the launch of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, which did most of the things the Lisa could do, but more reliably and at a quarter of the price.

The Lisa flopped, selling only about 10,000 units. A redesigned Lisa 2 in 1984 was cheaper, more reliable but more underpowered than the original. There was some interest from customers who wanted a device with a bigger display than the standard Mac, but the Lisa needed an emulator to run Mac software. In 1985 the final iteration of the Lisa was launched, as the Macintosh XL which proved to be at least of interest to consumers, but Apple ended up selling it at a loss.

Killed off by its own internal competition, a combination of cheap or untested components and an enormous price tag, the Lisa is one of the biggest failures in the history of Apple. Conversely the cut-down and more focussed version, the Macintosh, was one of the biggest successes. Today, a working Lisa system is very collectible and commands prices of thousands of dollars, although you are more likely to find the later Lisa 2 than the original.

Image credits:
Timothy Colegrove via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Paul Downey via Flickr – CC BY 2.0