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
My very first programming job, when I was 19, was programming accounts receivable, sales lead tracking, and creating some spreadsheets on a Royal Alphatronic PC in 1986, in Peabody at the New England Home Planning Center, a place that sold modular homes. 33 years later and I''m still hacking. All the coding I did on this thing was in Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. I forget the name of the software, but PeachTree rings a bell. Would love to find one on eBay for a trip down memory lane.
Hello everyone, does anyone know how much does it cost to get this legacy PC it''s great ? can we find it in auctions ? or something
Wednesday 16th August 2017
Obada El''esh (Jordan)
Hello, All this is about the TA PC 8, from wich I have 1 Matmos and 2 TA mainunits 1x F1 and 1x F2 Floppy and a 4x 5 MB HD(seagate 225) and FD80/40 trackn system and lots of software CP/M 2.2 $3 ,NZ-com,Z3plus and diskbasic based. But there is also a PC16 also a mainunit and 2 external floppydrives with 8088 cpu and MS-DOS compatible. I have one but have n''t used it a long time so I can''t remember how much $ in any case it will not start from IBM or Microsoft disks.
Groetjes,
Hans
Sunday 8th January 2012
Hans van der Puijl (Belgium)
NAME
ALPHATRONIC PC
MANUFACTURER
Triumph Adler
TYPE
Professional Computer
ORIGIN
Germany
YEAR
1983
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
Microsoft Basic 5.11
KEYBOARD
Full-stroke keyboard, 6 function keys, arrow keys and separated numeric keypad, 85 keys
CPU
Zilog Z80
SPEED
4 MHz
RAM
64 KB
ROM
32 KB
TEXT MODES
40 or 80 chars. x 24 lines
GRAPHIC MODES
80 x 72 / 160 x 72 dots
COLORS
8
SOUND
1 voice, built-in speaker
SIZE / WEIGHT
40.5 (W) x 25.5 (D) x 7.3 (H) cm / 3,5 kg
I/O PORTS
RGB video out, Tape interface, Serial RS232c/V24 port (from 300 to 9600 baud), Centronics/Parallel port, Disk-drive connector, Cartridge/Rompack slot
BUILT IN MEDIA
optional one or two 5.25'' disk-drives (320 kb each)
OS
CP/M 2.1 (then 2.2) with diskdrives
POWER SUPPLY
Built-in power supply unit
PERIPHERALS
5''1/4 disk-drives, printers (DRH 80/1 and TRD-170)
(France, 83)
