In January 1979, Bull signed an Agreement with CPT corporation, a company based in Minnesota, USA, for the distribution of word processing equipment by Bull. Three 8000 series systems were bought from CPT and sold under the Bull label, the TTX-80, TTX-85 and TTX-90.
These massive systems featured an Intel 8080 processor, 64 to 256 KB of RAM, a dual 8" floppy drive and above, a portrait monitor that could display a full page of A4. They were connected to a dedicated daisywheel printer and a 300-baud modem.
They could be connected to a 61 DPS/2 Bull Computer through the "Burothèque" software, allowing the documents to be sorted, archived or read directly from TTX system. The 61 DPS/2 then acts as a document server.
The TTX-90 was the last machine bought by Bull. Because of the very high prices of the CPT systems (at least 15,000 Euros), they finally produced their own dedicated word processing system, the TTX-35.
The TTX systems ran a very unique multitasking interrupt driven OS, able to save and retreive instantly a full A4 page of formatted text. However CPT did eventually offer standard CP/M 2.2 as alternate OS, though they did not call it CP/M.
Due to its high price level, the TTX systems did not meet a large success, except in Bull offices and some French public services.
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More information from Jay Craswell:
There was an external hard drive available that was a 8" 30 Meg. (or was it 16"?) huge box called Wordpack and a little drive that held a 5/14 full height 5 Megabyte and later 10 Megabyte drive. There was also a Star Hub type server called the SRS45 which was a storage unit for multiple CPT computers.
Thomas Cook specifies:
CPT Corporation started in 1971 In St. Louis Park, Minnesota, moved to Hopkins in 1974 then to Eden Praire in 1978. In 1981 they opened a seperate manufacturing facility in Channessan.
They also offered 24 pin dot matrix printers and a 300dpi laser printer.
Their first external hard drive was an external 14" 5Mb hard drive. The box was optioned for up to 3 drives. After that they came out with a 5 1/4" MFM-SCSI drives starting at 5MB and topping out at 30MB.
Please consider donating your old computer / videogame system to Old-Computers.com or one of our partners from anywhere in the world (Europe, America, Asia, etc.).
Good evening!!
I am looking for some image of the boot disks.
Tuesday 27th December 2022
Jonatan Khalil Seletti (Argentina)
I worked for CII-Honeywell Bull in Belgium from 1977 into the ''80s. I was a uC freak so I was the first to repair most pcb''s of the (CPT) TTX machines in our repair Center in Brussels. It was a bit tricky, because I did not obtain original schematics. I did have NO software, apart from the executables pm floppy and in the ROM inside the machine. Internally it used an inter-pcb bus with extra states ("on top of the normal" 8080 cycles). After half a year I repaired all the pcb''s in house, reducing turn-around time, stock size and costs for our field engineers. The display controller generated a (ECL) video signal from a 55MHz dot clock which was fasssst for that time and type of machines. I have good memories about this machine. It worked nicely. Never got to using the cp/m disks... perhaps the old uC club members within the Bull personnel had more experience with that.
Thursday 8th April 2010
Guido Gybels (Belgium)
Today, i entered an office, where people are still working with this system (though CPT-branded)!! This is 2007. They store the files on 8" floppy-discs!! Apparently there still is one technician alive in Berlin doing their maintenance. amazing
