24k #1 -- 24 for 24
The new year is almost upon us and I just can’t wait to share one of Paper Tiger’s plans for 2024. 24 profiles of computers with 24k memory. Because we’re jumping the gun a bit, let’s start with a machine with almost 24k. The Thomson TO7.
First things first. The TO7 had 8k of user memory, 8k of monochrome video memory, and 6k of color memory for a total of 22k.
Next, and I hope you’re seated comfortably because this could be a shock, France had its own home computers. Home computers in the early eighties were a little bit like the Marvel parallel multiverse. If you had been warped into one of the kitchens or teenage bedrooms featured in period computer ads from another country, you might not have immediately noticed that the gravity was slightly off or that there were Zeppelins thick as flies. One look at the weird computers and you would have known that you were not in (your) Kansas anymore.
McDonalds came to France in 1972, two years before it came to the UK. Germany, Netherlands, and Japan beat them both with franchises that opened in 1971. These arches, our tip of the French fry for cultural imperialism, became so pervasive that the Economist newspaper created the Big Mac index to compare purchasing power between economies and across currencies. While the portion size, nutritional profile, and cost of the Big Mac may vary by locale, they are what you would call compatible. Much less so for computers of the era. Did you know that if you first bite a small notch in the side of your Big Mac, it will work just fine if you eat it upside down. Maybe.
Just as the BBC created a national ‘Computer Literacy Project’ in the early 1980s to jumpstart a generation of budding hackers, France had been iterating on a national curriculum for computing since 1971. While I don’t know that this was driven by fears of a hamburger hegemon who would steamroller national traditions in both cuisine and computing, I can’t rule it out.
In Britain, the Acorn BBC Micro is as fixed in techno-mythology as Arthur is in popular mythology. It was a marvelous once-and-future machine that united the island for a time and then returned to rule the world as the ARM architecture. In France, the role of technological uniter fell to the network behind the millions of Minitel terminals.
Thomson started out as a French subsidiary of GE and wound up, unsurprisingly, like a little nationalized GE — a conglomerate that dabbled in defense contracting, consumer electronics, and in businesses in between. A closer analog may be to GE’s subsidiary RCA. While GE never released a home computer, RCA did.
Oh, yeah. Back to the TO7. Did I mention that it included a light pen in a special drawer? Many other machines of the era supported the light pen in one way or another but few included it. Otherwise, it was pretty standard stuff for a non-standard machine. Cassettes, Microsoft Basic on tape, ROM cartridges. Membrane keyboard later upgraded to mechanical. A look sort of like an Amstrad CPC but attractive. The TO7 was built on the Motorola 6809, a more sophisticated cousin of the 6800 but still an 8 bit machine. It had the same processor as the relatively popular Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer but was not compatible with that machine. It had a software library that consisted of … on, yeah. That’s what the 8 bit era was like. It was a machine more capable than most of the software written for it but less inspiring than required to stimulate sales and the development of more software. If 8-bit home computers were quirky 4-cylinder sports cars, the TO7 may have been the Matra Murena. Wedge shaped, French, not very fast, and low volume but full of parts bin components. Like the TO7 with almost 24k, the Murena had sort of an odd capacity — three seats in one row. Both the TO7 and Murena accepted the same physical cassettes, but neither intelligible to the other. Such was life in the 1980s.
See you in 2024!