24k #23 — Micral C
Portable thermal typewriters are cool even if they have less than 24k but they lack substance. They lack the kind of plot armor that keeps them from being written out of the story. They lack … furniture. There was a time when one of the proudest things you could say about your new computer was that it was freestanding. Readers, the Micral C stood free. This confident upright machine and its handsome modern cabinet.
The French claims to have invented the microcomputer rest on the Micral story, though these claims are decorated with enough caveats that the claim is very narrow. Wikipedia says “The Micral N was the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computer based on a microprocessor”. I suspect that it might take additional caveats to make it wholly true — perhaps this really means that the computing world was sort of exploding around the time release of 8008 and technology moved faster than record keeping. I think it was certainly commercial in the sense that somebody got paid, non-kit in the sense that it came without assembly instructions, and personal in the sense that there was just the one. Wikipedia also says ”The front panel console was optional, offering customers the option of designing their own console to match a particular application”. The front panel is optional for your convenience and maybe you would prefer to make your own anyway. It’s not a kit as such, more of a craft project.
By the later 1970s, the checks for Machine #1 and thousands of successors had cleared and Micral had settled into the role of quirky business microcomputer vendor with a line based on the same micrprocessors, hard drives, and floppy disks as the rest of the industry. The software was maybe not on par with the rest of the microcomputer industry but you could see the state of the art if you stood on top of the Micral manuals. After the original machine, the Micral N, came the Micral G with 16k memory. Then the Micral S, then the M, then the C. C is our stop on this crazy train today so let’s alight before we wind up at V (portable), the Z80-based machines, or the line of Micral-flavor IBM PC clones.
A manual for the Micral C is available online. It says the machine has 24k RAM, so achievement unlocked — it’s our 23rd and penultimate entry in the 24 x 24k for 2024 series. You’re not likely to run in to a Micral C in the wild but the manual evokes the period ethos. What’s an operating system? Basically any program that runs long enough. What is a filesystem but the series of errors it can produce?
I especially like:
When I market my first computer, I‘m going to include a puppy and a bottle of wine so that I can write a manual that says ‘The puppy and the bottle of wine are self-explanatory. The functions of a few features of the system are explained on the next page.” Then, you see, I can include gems like this on the next page (Courtesy the Micral C manual)
BREAK — unused
PARITY ODD, EVEN, NO — Operate the Micral C with this switch in the NO position.
FULL/HALF DUP — Operate with switch in the FULL DUP (Duplex) position
Perhaps my favorite are the three arrow keys, one each for left, right, and up. Down is either beyond the scope of the manual or equivalent to line feed.
You kind of get the sense that maybe the computer is advertised as free standing in the same way that three dogs in a trenchcoat might aspire to be. It’s a serial terminal sitting on a desk that’s had three of its legs cut off and replaced with a box of nonsense. Maybe more like three dogs in a trenchcoat with no trenchcoat.
This isn’t a retrocomputing or a vintage technology blog. The internet is probably over full of those already. This is a gadget philosophy blog and my philosophy is that any IO port in a storm will do. The manufacturer’s opinions about what a system does and how it should be used matter little once the machine is at your disposal. Perhaps the best way to understand the Micral line is through what you bring to the console, through the French proverb “a bad workman will never find a good tool”.