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Triumph was originally Triumph-Adler - the merger company of the 2 typewriter manufacturers Triumph and Adler, to which Triumph (which also produced mechanical calculators and sewing-machines) was the bigger one. Later they got US-typewriter Royal merged into it and had the best years between 1975 and 1988, when they even build competiting machines to IBM System /34 and /36 ... but they did neither understand nor learn the business and ran out of the financial power.

The technical part of TA is today a subsidary of Olivetti which tells it all about the downfall of TA. The operational part is a Holding in Nuremberg, which deals with offices, buildings and health-care.

The Alphatronic was mainly sold in Germany and was intended as a 'hybrid' Business / Home machine. For Business it was sold as either a 'dumb' Terminal or as a stand-alone Word Processor 'package' (consisting of base unit, WP Cartridge and (Centronics) printer.

For home the base unit had a 'built in' Basic ROM - it was also available with either a single or dual Floppy Disks (which included CP/M and Disk basic).

It never sold very well in either market - it was much too expensive for home use.

Thanks to its Z80 CPU, the Alphatronic PC can run CP/M and quite a few software packages available for it. There were two external disk-drives available: F1 and F2. F1 had the controller built-in. You had to have F1 to use F2, the second one.

Sometimes, the Alphatronic PC was sold as a complete wordprocessing package with a daisy-wheel printer (Triumph-Adler TR-170) and a word-processing cartridge inserted into the ROM-pack slot (top left part of the case).

Towards the end of it's life, the British Company, MATMOS sold off the final 'batch' or single & dual floppy packages together with a RGB-PAL convertor box.

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Contributors: Steeve Buniak