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800 Junior

The Elwro 800 series was designed in 1985 by people from the Automatics Institute of Technical University in Poznan, following the request of Polish Ministry of Education.

The final product had to be:
• Cheap,
• ZX Spectrum compatible,
• Appropriate for school use.

The computer went into production in 1986 in Elwro Electronic Factory of Wroclaw, Poland. It was fully Spectrum compatible. Designers also added network capability to access the shared printers and floppy drives.

The operating system was CP/J, a modified version of CP/M allowing networks called Junet to be managed. The 800 Junior could could work under the CP/M 2.2.

The funny thing is the computer case was taken from a toy piano. The wire on the top of the case was used initially as a music stand...

Planned production volume for 1986 was 500 pieces.

Elwro 800 Junior was released in three different versions:
Elwro 800, the "student" version had no disk controller,
Elwro 800-2, the "teacher" version had a disk controller,
Elwro 800-3 was a off-line version students or teachers could use.

In 1990, a Junior 804 prototype was built. It had a built-in 3.5" floppy disc drive and looked like a Commodore 128.

Elwro factory closed its doors in late eighties. Assets were sold to Siemens.

Thanks to Pawel Kubacki from Poland for information and pictures.

Maciek Goralski adds:
There was some kind of XT PC made by elwro - it was elwro own design and it could be used with Junet network - in my primary school we were using one Elwro PC with 8, maybe 10 Elwro's 800-3 Junior and 2 east german floppy disc drives - it was fantastic computer :)