The Interact computer had a very short life in USA. It had only just got in production when the Interact Co. of Ann Arbor MI, went bankrupt. Several thousand machines were produced though. Some of them were sold by Protecto Enterprizes of Barrington, IL, the liquidator, but the main part was sold by MicroVideo, also of Ann Arbor. Protecto bought lots of back-of-the-magazine ads for years, always printed with "WE LOVE OUR CUSTOMERS".
The Interact shipped with 2 joysticks, a built-in tape recorder, a TV RF modulator and 2 KB of ROM. Everything, including BASIC, must be loaded from tape. A little trivia: The tape unit did include an erase head, but it was not connected! Tapes had to be erased on a regular cassette recorder before being reused. Another surprising feature is that the "1" key is after the "0" key at the far right of the keyboard. Thus the row is starting from 2 and finishing by 1... See explanation in the "Read more" page.
MicroVideo supported the machine for two years, 1979-80, making some hardware expansions (32K RAM card and stringy floppy drive), replacing the original minimalist EDU-BASIC language with a Microsoft 8K graphic version, and even publishing 3 issues of 'Interaction', a newsletter of the Detroit Interact Group.
The Interact computer finally vanished from the US market in late 1980. However, a French company bought the rights of the machine and started to sell the Interact under Victor Lambda name in French market. See the rest of the story here.
For five years, several improved sequels of the Interact, called Hector, were launched in France. The last version, the Hector MX, featured high resolution graphics and 4 built-in languages!
We need to archive and digitize Interact software before all is lost. If you have old Interact tapes, thanks to contact us.
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