This British computer was one of the most popular computers in Europe in the beginning of the 80's. It was a small computer, which was a competitor of the Sinclair Spectrum.
The two models (16 and 48) had the same technical characteristics.
A small plotter was available for this computer.
The Oric 1 was the first computer I owned. Brought into New Zealand by Barson Brothers of Papakura. There were rumours in the 90''s that they still had a warehouse full of them. What sold me on the Oric was the sound, there was a real paper cone speaker about 3-4cm in diameter. It was LOUD! At certain frequencies I could vibrate the Oric across the desk, much like a cell phone on vibrate. Most of my programming was generating interesting sounds. You could get 4 bit digital waveforms out of the sound chip by rapidly (machine code) changing the volume register. So I learnt 6502 assembly on the Oric. I had the assembler and Forth language plus a few games I thought the embedded colour attributes was an interesting technical response to the demands of hires graphics, 8 colours on screen, and memory conservation. To change the color of a pixel, somewhere to the left of that pixel you changed the foreground/background colour. This took up 8 pixels and set the foreground/background ($ flash) for the rest of the scan line or until another attribute code is found.
Monday 30th August 2010
Jeremy Thomson (New Zealand)
Bought one of these for the younger offspring and it eventually went faulty.
I still have the replacement model (which featured a proper keyboard) but, unfortunately, the other half threw out the games and operating tapes for it.
Monday 14th June 2010
Stuart
Ahhh the memories!,this was my very 1st computer that my Dad bought me 2nd hand, I can still remember going to the original owners house to see it working, after having this for a while I then had a Spectrum+
Saturday 27th December 2008
Adrian Pitman (Somerset,UK)
NAME
ORIC 1
MANUFACTURER
Oric
TYPE
Home Computer
ORIGIN
United Kingdom
YEAR
1983
END OF PRODUCTION
Unknown
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
Oric Extended Basic v1.0
KEYBOARD
Chicklet keyboard, 57 keys. ESC, DEL ,CTRL, 2 x SHIFT, RETURN, 4 x arrow keys and one large spacebar
CPU
6502A
SPEED
1 MHz
CO-PROCESSOR
Custom gate array chip
RAM
16 KB or 48 KB
ROM
16 KB
TEXT MODES
40 x 28
GRAPHIC MODES
240 x 200 (high resolution)
COLORS
8
SOUND
Programmable Sound Generator AY-3-8912 (from General Instruments) 3 voices, 8 octaves + white noise
SIZE / WEIGHT
28 (W) x 17.8 (D) x 1.5 (H) cm / 848 g
I/O PORTS
Bus, Printer, Tape, RGB
POWER SUPPLY
External power supply unit
PERIPHERALS
4-pen plotter printer, 3'' floppy disk drive unit
PRICE
£129.95 for 16K model with starter pack (UK 1983)
That was my first computer ! Nothing can replace it in my heart, except the Atmos maybe...
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