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.
___________
Contributors: Steeve Buniak
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.).
Anybody interested in getting lots of parts and some functional Systems for free? I''m living in a
Nuremberg and if you are interested send me an e-mail.
Saturday 4th September 2021
Joachim Feld (Deutschland)
Package deal on this computer, with disk drive, monitor and software was sold for $498 during summer 1985 (marked down from $1448 according to the info): https://youtu.be/TTi80NldsYE?t$289
Monday 2nd August 2021
Numanoid (Norway)
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.
