Pertec
PCC-2000 (1978)
The first mass market usable home computer, well, let's be honest here, the first computer that could be built and used for something by a reasonably determined enthusiast, was the MITS Altair,
the
design of which was presented in the American magazine Popular
Electronics in January 1975. It had been developed by Edward Roberts,
William Yates and Jim Bybee over the previous two years and it burst
upon the nerdish world rather like a new sun.
The important point to note about the Altair was that it promised far more than it ever delivered. However, that really didn't matter to the hobbyists who bought it. The computer was sold by the thousand as a kit and the designers' company, MITS, mushroomed. The microcomputer boom had started.
By the end of 1976, though, MITS was in serious financial trouble and the founders were looking for someone to take it off their hands. Come May 1977 and a white knight was seen on the horizon bearing six million dollars. The white knight went by the name of Pertec.
From the first, the merger does not seem to have been a happy one. Pertec's expertise lay in developing peripherals for the major manufacturers such as IBM. They worked to detailed plans and produced clear documentation on all their products because if they didn't, their customers wouldn't pay them. The MITS people came from a more relaxed environment and there seems to have been a major culture clash. Before long, the MITS people were leaving.
Pertec moved design much more towards the business end of the spectrum by combining the last MITS computer design, the 8800b, with their own eight inch floppy disk sub-system to form the MITS 300/25 Small Business System. This was basically a desk supported by a blue box holding the electronics. Place a dumb terminal on top of the desk and hook it up to the computer and you were ready to go. If the blue box contained a fourteen inch hard disk drive, it became the MITS 300/55 Small Business System.
Capable
as they were, these things looked just
a little on the bulky
side next to the Apple II, Commodore Pet and Tandy TRS-80 that were
beginning to dominate the small business market. By 1978 Pertec seems
to have given up on the MITS name and were looking to build something
just a little snappier. The result was an amazing piece of engineering
called the PCC-2000.
If the intention had been to make a machine that was as compact as the Apple, Pertec certainly fluffed it. A PCC-2000 consisted of a card cage, two eight inch floppy disk drivers and a twelve inch green phospor display, all in a metal casing of considerable structural integrity, which was permanently linked to a very good and extremely solid keyboard by a heavy duty cable. The whole thing weighed over a hundred pounds and really took two men to move it. Petite it was not.
There could be no doubting the quality of the components or the construction. The PCC-2000 was beautifully made to the highest standards. The screen was a cut well above the, frankly, mediocre offerings from Commodore or Radio Shack and the keyboard was a delight to use. Moreover, these machines were reliable. You switched them on and they worked. It didn't matter how often or how far you moved them, they just worked. If you didn't live through the early days of micro-computing, you have no idea just how unusual that was.
Pertec sold the PCC-2000 as a system computer that could support up to four additional users on dumb terminals. To this end they supplied an odd, multi-user operating system called MTX for which there were the standard (American) ledgers available and some not very sophisticated office packages such as word processing. You could also hook up a fourteen inch dual disk drive that gave you five megabytes of fixed storage and five megabytes removable. That was serious storage for the end of the 'seventies.
The problem was that Rolls-Royce construction came at a Rolls-Royce price and that was just too much for the market. The machine bombed.
My personal introduction to the PCC-2000 came when I was asked to find a computer for the small Devonian company I was then working for. In an issue of Wireless World I came across an advertisement offering PCC-2000s at knock-down prices, if I recall correctly, about half the going rate for a Commodore Pet.
A few 'phone calls later and my boss and I were trecking across southern England to a little village in Kent to view them. The vendor turned out to have bought the entire UK stock from the importer. My boss made the decision to buy three of the computers and two disk drives.
We returned the following week with two large estate cars and picked up the kit. We barely got it all in. A long drive home later, we unpacked the computers, stuck them on desks and voila! Three glowing phosphor screens complete with input prompts. Which led us to the next problem, what were we going to run on them?
It soon became obvious that the software that came with the Pertecs was never going to meet our needs, even though we had the source code. It was just too American in style to be acceptable to the British authorities. The Company Secretary took one look at the screens and sample printouts and issued a straight-forward no!
Time for Plan B.
I had quite a lot of experience with Cap's BOS, a laudable British attempt to build a completely portable operating system for micro and mini computers. Remember, at this time there were new computers coming out, it sometimes seemed, every week and every one of them had a different operating system.
I happened to know that BOS had ben ported to the Pertec and it seemed like exactly what the company needed. A visit to London to discuss the matter resulted in my employer deciding that he could see a market here and, rather to my amazement, we became BOS dealers for the far south-west of England.
In the event, the marriage of the PCC-2000 to BOS was a very happy one. We bought up the remainder of the stock (getting it shipped professionaly - none of us fancied trying to shift that lot in cars) and settled down to sell systems in Devon and Somerset. Eventually we also sold some Sirius based systems (the Sirius was the English version of Chuck Peddlar's Victor computer) and I got to do some interesting programming in BOS/MicroCobol, on a PCC-2000 that lived under the stairs in our little house.
The bottom line was that the PCC-2000 was an excellent machine that was just too expensive. As our experience proved, at the right price the PCC-2000 would sell well. The problem was, the right price was just a fraction of what they cost to make.
The first mass market usable home computer, well, let's be honest here, the first computer that could be built and used for something by a reasonably determined enthusiast, was the MITS Altair,
the
design of which was presented in the American magazine Popular
Electronics in January 1975. It had been developed by Edward Roberts,
William Yates and Jim Bybee over the previous two years and it burst
upon the nerdish world rather like a new sun.The important point to note about the Altair was that it promised far more than it ever delivered. However, that really didn't matter to the hobbyists who bought it. The computer was sold by the thousand as a kit and the designers' company, MITS, mushroomed. The microcomputer boom had started.
By the end of 1976, though, MITS was in serious financial trouble and the founders were looking for someone to take it off their hands. Come May 1977 and a white knight was seen on the horizon bearing six million dollars. The white knight went by the name of Pertec.
Less
than Happy
From the first, the merger does not seem to have been a happy one. Pertec's expertise lay in developing peripherals for the major manufacturers such as IBM. They worked to detailed plans and produced clear documentation on all their products because if they didn't, their customers wouldn't pay them. The MITS people came from a more relaxed environment and there seems to have been a major culture clash. Before long, the MITS people were leaving.
Pertec moved design much more towards the business end of the spectrum by combining the last MITS computer design, the 8800b, with their own eight inch floppy disk sub-system to form the MITS 300/25 Small Business System. This was basically a desk supported by a blue box holding the electronics. Place a dumb terminal on top of the desk and hook it up to the computer and you were ready to go. If the blue box contained a fourteen inch hard disk drive, it became the MITS 300/55 Small Business System.
Capable
as they were, these things looked just
a little on the bulky
side next to the Apple II, Commodore Pet and Tandy TRS-80 that were
beginning to dominate the small business market. By 1978 Pertec seems
to have given up on the MITS name and were looking to build something
just a little snappier. The result was an amazing piece of engineering
called the PCC-2000. If the intention had been to make a machine that was as compact as the Apple, Pertec certainly fluffed it. A PCC-2000 consisted of a card cage, two eight inch floppy disk drivers and a twelve inch green phospor display, all in a metal casing of considerable structural integrity, which was permanently linked to a very good and extremely solid keyboard by a heavy duty cable. The whole thing weighed over a hundred pounds and really took two men to move it. Petite it was not.
Quality
Construction
There could be no doubting the quality of the components or the construction. The PCC-2000 was beautifully made to the highest standards. The screen was a cut well above the, frankly, mediocre offerings from Commodore or Radio Shack and the keyboard was a delight to use. Moreover, these machines were reliable. You switched them on and they worked. It didn't matter how often or how far you moved them, they just worked. If you didn't live through the early days of micro-computing, you have no idea just how unusual that was.
Pertec sold the PCC-2000 as a system computer that could support up to four additional users on dumb terminals. To this end they supplied an odd, multi-user operating system called MTX for which there were the standard (American) ledgers available and some not very sophisticated office packages such as word processing. You could also hook up a fourteen inch dual disk drive that gave you five megabytes of fixed storage and five megabytes removable. That was serious storage for the end of the 'seventies.
The problem was that Rolls-Royce construction came at a Rolls-Royce price and that was just too much for the market. The machine bombed.
My personal introduction to the PCC-2000 came when I was asked to find a computer for the small Devonian company I was then working for. In an issue of Wireless World I came across an advertisement offering PCC-2000s at knock-down prices, if I recall correctly, about half the going rate for a Commodore Pet.
A few 'phone calls later and my boss and I were trecking across southern England to a little village in Kent to view them. The vendor turned out to have bought the entire UK stock from the importer. My boss made the decision to buy three of the computers and two disk drives.
We returned the following week with two large estate cars and picked up the kit. We barely got it all in. A long drive home later, we unpacked the computers, stuck them on desks and voila! Three glowing phosphor screens complete with input prompts. Which led us to the next problem, what were we going to run on them?
Wrong
Code
It soon became obvious that the software that came with the Pertecs was never going to meet our needs, even though we had the source code. It was just too American in style to be acceptable to the British authorities. The Company Secretary took one look at the screens and sample printouts and issued a straight-forward no!
Time for Plan B.
I had quite a lot of experience with Cap's BOS, a laudable British attempt to build a completely portable operating system for micro and mini computers. Remember, at this time there were new computers coming out, it sometimes seemed, every week and every one of them had a different operating system.
I happened to know that BOS had ben ported to the Pertec and it seemed like exactly what the company needed. A visit to London to discuss the matter resulted in my employer deciding that he could see a market here and, rather to my amazement, we became BOS dealers for the far south-west of England.
In the event, the marriage of the PCC-2000 to BOS was a very happy one. We bought up the remainder of the stock (getting it shipped professionaly - none of us fancied trying to shift that lot in cars) and settled down to sell systems in Devon and Somerset. Eventually we also sold some Sirius based systems (the Sirius was the English version of Chuck Peddlar's Victor computer) and I got to do some interesting programming in BOS/MicroCobol, on a PCC-2000 that lived under the stairs in our little house.
The bottom line was that the PCC-2000 was an excellent machine that was just too expensive. As our experience proved, at the right price the PCC-2000 would sell well. The problem was, the right price was just a fraction of what they cost to make.
Find out more
by searching Google here...