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1974 Color Intelligent Terminal (Intecolor 8000 from Norcross, Ga) - anyone familiar with it?

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voidstar78

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I was searching old Datamation issues for the earliest mention of the Q1 Corporation microcomputer.

The first mention of the use of the Intel 8008 that I could find is Dec. 1973 in the "A-100A Datacumulator" device). This is not to say that was the first system to use the 8008, but from the perspective of Datamation (that focused on "dp" dataprocessing system), that is where an article first mentions the Intel 8008.

The 8008 is then mentioned briefly a month later, Jan. 1974 issue, on page 18.

The March 1974 issue wasn't available to me.

Then, in May 1974 issue, I came across the following "Color Intelligent Terminal" (4K RAM, but not clear how it was programmable -- like the Datapoint 2200 and SOL-20, they used the term "intelligent terminal" to mean programmable). Interesting to me that it was 80x25 text and also had a "plot mode for doing curves" so unclear how much of a graphics mode that was, but it also supported "eight-color" terminal.

While it states a price and 90-day waiting period, does anyone know if any were actually built? Looks like it was. The following article also lists the 8 colors that were available.
"THE APPLICATION OF THE INTERCOLOR 8000 TERMINAL TO THEMATIC CARTOGRAPHY" (used by University of Tennessee)


Neat stuff. I'm not sure how it was programmed (similar to the original Datapoint 2200 -- I recall reading CTC used some "larger" HP system to do the initial programming that was then loaded on the tape).



1679475558035.png




And, by the way, I did finally come across a Q1 Corporation advertisement. The earliest ad I could find was in the October 1977 issue (page 161). It is a very simple ad that is repeated in a few subsequent issues, which has no image and simply just says:

"Q1 Corporation the first company to develop, manufacture and market microcomputer systems has now introduced the Q1/Lite, the ultimate office machine"
Then list Hauppauge, New York 11787 and a couple contact phone numbers.

So, I'm still a little suspect about Q1's 1972 claim. Even if it was actually 1973 or 1974, I'd still want to see an actual price before declaring it a commercial product.
 

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Highlights from the brochure (to me):

"Color Data Terminals at Black-and-White Prices"

example escape sequences:
(ESC) T/,0,0,479,383 plots a vector diagonally across the screen
(ESC) T<,100,100,350,300 plots a rectangle with diagonally-opposed corner points
(ESC) T(,240,192,100 plots a circle with center 240,192 and radius of 100

(on page 8 is an interesting ESC code: "^ jump to 9F93H" - CRT O.S. branches to 9F93H)


"512 software programmable characters" (6x8 pixels)
wow, sounds like an early EGA of sorts?


NOTE: The brochure mentions (on about page 7) "8080A microprocessor" - so now I'm wondering if perhaps the Datamation article might have been in error when it mentioned using the Intel 8008??? Only way to verify is to open a pre-1975 one and look :) But the date on this brochure is unclear to me - recall the original Datapoint 2200 has a model 1 and model 2 (i.e. within about a year it had been upgraded or some variants built -- maybe that's the same for the original Intecolor 8000, they did some upgrades within the same model number).

$7000+ puts it out of "home computer" category (IMO), plus if didn't have a built-in programmable-option (e.g. machine code monitor of some sort). i.e. if not really "self programmable" but have to use some other special (expensive) equipment to program it? Still, a pre-1975 microprocessor based system.

I know the ECHO IV was doing some neat graphics-terminal work in the late 1960s, but I don't think color or software-defined characters (and no intention of being self-programmable)?
 
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Al Kossow said:
ISC was pretty widely used in the process control industry.
The Intecolor was one of the earliest low-cost color CRT with simple graphics
The only 8000s I ever saw had 8080s in them (actually 8001s see ad below)
Click to expand...

Nice find on the ad. $1400 kit gets more reasonable. What does the following mean:

"Shadow Mask Color CR Tube" ?
"9 Sector Convergence System" ?

I see it was a 1976 ad. And it says "additional RAM to 32K". Maybe the original 8000 model did use an 8008.

Would love to see the inside of one (e.g. how many cards inside the "CRT" portion versus is anything inside/below the keyboard?) It's main problem (competition-wise) was probably a lack of any bus?
 
While updating my own Web pages on S-100 and this early Compucolor product, I found this now-old thread. Here's some updates.

1) Pretty obvious, the Compucolor 8000 and subsequent computers/terminals were never 8008 based.

2) the apparently earliest ISC model is the Compucolor 8001 AKA Intecolor 80?? from the late 1970's. It consisted of several logic boards
in a card cage, in a color CRT TV-like chassis. Later Compucolor models were in a custom terminal chassis and had a single-board digital logic.

3) Much of the present online documentation for and content about "Compupcolor" were of later models. A good example is


4) A Web search in June 2024 found a Web site with a comprehensive description of the earliest card-cage version of the Compucolor 8001:


5) My Web page on the Intecolor 8001 precedes most of these other sites. But my page was essentially a place-holder about an odd
vintage computer I found and salvaged in the early 2010's. With recent interest, I'll update my Web page to reflect some of these
resources and see about making my documentation available.


Regards, Herb Johnson
retrotechnology.com
 
Also, the big Intecolor machines use an 8-track tape cartridge for mass storage!

The later Compucolor II systems were nasty, hacked-up little bits of work built into portable TV cabinets. We sold them at the shop where I worked the service bench in 1980 +/- a couple of years. ISC was forever putting out ECNs on those systems and images of having to constantly do the convergence adjustments haunt my dreams. The things are so seared into my memory that to this day I can tell you that they used a 13VAXP22 CRT. And I think I may still have a board set lying around here somewhere...

To their credit, though, when they worked the image was superior to that of the Apple ][ that they were trying to compete against, since the Compucolor generated actual colour and the Apple - while a very clever design - just sort of smeared into the neighborhood.
 
hjohnson said:
1) Pretty obvious, the Compucolor 8000 and subsequent computers/terminals were never 8008 based.
Click to expand...

Well, do you mean the Datamation 1974 article "mis-spoke" and didn't mean Intel 8008? Or were the systems not really sold and available that early? Wang, in 1974, included in their advertisements the slogan "what you see is what you get" (yes, the same slogan used later in mid-90's Windows). But the context for Wang was "what you see in the advertisement is what you really get", meaning they were sensitive to other shops that didn't quite deliver what they claimed. Or if you mean the article was just a type-o or misspoke, that's certainly possible: back then, there was no internet to really cross-check things, or just there was more "draft work" then - and content from drafts could end up in final published articles. So it's not a malicious intent, it's just accident happened and an editor maybe didn't note things down quite correctly, etc. (I've seen that also in early 80s articles)


In another ISC advertisement, it mentions "And you also get the Intercolor 8001 9 Sector Convergence System for ease of setup (3-5 minutes) and stability" - can you elaborate on that? Did their color system really take longer than a couple minutes to stabilize?
 
I apologize for necroposting, but I think I have answers to most of these questions.

hjohnson said:
1) Pretty obvious, the Compucolor 8000 and subsequent computers/terminals were never 8008 based.
Click to expand...

I'm fairly sure the Intecolor 8000 shipped with the 8008 for at least a year. The October 25, 1975 issue of Electronic Design (page 104 in the PDF; "Intecolor" was mis-OCRed as "Lntecolor", lowercase L) mentions:

Screenshot 2024-12-25 084843.png

Since this article from over a year after the May 1974 one also mentions the 8008, I doubt the Datamation article was in error. My guess is that it was first available with the 8008, then the 8080 optionally, and maybe later they removed the 8008 option. The color photo also shows what the terminal's color graphs looked like.

voidstar78 said:
So, I'm still a little suspect about Q1's 1972 claim. Even if it was actually 1973 or 1974, I'd still want to see an actual price before declaring it a commercial product.
Click to expand...

Regarding the Q1, it's understandably tricky to find info about the company or its products, since their name is very generic and could easily be mis-OCRed as "Qi", "QL" (lowercase L), or any number of things. The company's founder, Daniel Alroy, claimed the first delivery date of their first system as December 11, 1972 to Litton Industries.

While Intel were considering scrapping the 8008 (formerly 1201) CPU after Datapoint's rejection of it for their 2200, Daniel Alroy met with Bob Noyce of Intel to convince him to release the chip. Alroy said the 4004 was "unsuitable for general purpose use because, among other things, its 4-bit wide type size was insufficient even to represent alphabetical characters", and that an 8-bit microprocessor would revolutionize the computer industry. Alroy "suggested that [he] might be the 8008′s first customer" to Noyce, and also met with Phil Ray of Datapoint to allow Intel to release the 8008. (On a side note, it seems that Q1 was not the 8008's first customer, since Seiko, who worked with Intel on the 8008, had released and were advertising their S-500 desktop calculator/computer hybrid by May 1972; Intel confirmed it was using the MCS-8/8008 in an April 1973 brochure).

As for mentions of Q1 Corp. themselves in contemporaneous print, they were mentioned developing "a small, general-purpose office computer system" in the November 9, 1972 issue of the New York Times.

Finally and most importantly, after some searching of archive.org with variations of "Q1 Corp" in all text contents, I found that the computer's release was mentioned in a couple magazines in January and early February 1973. Particularly, the January 31, 1973 issue of Computerworld ("Q1 Corp." is highlighted in blue), the February 1, 1973 issue of Electronic Design (page 21 in the PDF; "Q1" was mis-OCRed as "Qi"), and the January 29, 1973 issue of Electronic News (cited by Alroy and not online AFAIK). The Computerworld article states that the name of the "desk-top minicomputer" is the Q1/T. The Electronic Design article gives the price of the base 4k model as $10,000, with both articles mentioning the memory is increasable in 4k increments to 16k (with a claim of a 64k system on the way in the Computerworld article). Despite the Computerworld article claiming it's a minicomputer (understandable since the term "microcomputer" was still quite new), the Electronic Design article confirms it's using the Intel 8008, but also interestingly mentions this:

Screenshot 2024-12-25 093550.png

At this point, the 8080 would be over a year away from its final spring 1974 release date, and half a year away from the layout of the chip being finalized.

Given the two early 1973 articles, I think the December 11, 1972 first delivery date is reasonable. The mention of the 8080 in the Electronic Design article makes Alroy's claim of delivering a pre-production 8080-based system in April 1974 also seem reasonable in my opinion, given they had such early knowledge of the 8080.
 
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