• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Viatron

O

olddataman

Experienced Member
Joined
May 20, 2003
Messages
94
Location
Bloomingtom, IN
Looking for anyone who knows anything about a company named Viatron and whose product was a data entry work station consisting of a video display, keyboard, cassette recorder and communications facilities with a microprocessor chipset as the basis for it's success or failure. It received vast amounts of advertising and hype in 1967 and 68 but went out of business by 1970 or 71 due to lack of second round financing and poor yields of their custom designed nmicroprocessor chip sets.
Is anyone looking for one of their terminals, or documentatioin or anything?
 
Viatron

Hello,
I worked for Control Systems Ltd. at Uxbridge Middlesex, UK during the 70's, and worked on Viatron systems.

I am not sure how Control Systems/Bell Punch Co. got involved with Viatron, but somehow we acquired all the technical documentation and a few of their data terminals plus probably their one and only Mini Computer.

I was involved briefly in the project, and we were trying to do something useful with their terminals which as I recall had two Cassette drives for data storage, a CRT display and keyboard. The cassettes were special Viatron cassettes which looked like normal Philips cassettes, but had an extra centre track with a sine-wave signal recorded on it which was used for speed control of the tapes. I believe there were serial ports for a printer etc.

We had to build a special modified terminal with an external software configuration to be used with the Viatron Mini-Computer. The Mini-Computer was reckoned to be "state of the art" at the time and was all built with VLSI chips.

I'm not sure whatever happened after that as the project fizzled, and I left shortly after.

I remember seeing heaps of technical drawings, but I expect they have long gone.

Sorry not be of more help, but hope this may revive some memories.
Regards
David Austin
 
I have recently acquired a 1970 Viatron computer and I'm looking for any available documentation or anyone with an interest in it
I saved it from a scrap heap and hopefully I can get it doing something and find good home
 
viatron

viatron

We have some data on it in the Computer History Museum archives.
I'll see if we have anything on the computer.
 
thansk I can send photos if your interested. This unit was actually in the collection of Dr An Wang and scrapped when buildings were consolidated .
 
Viatron

I located some information on the computer.

It is a 16 bit processor, as you mentioned, built from LSI parts.

I'll scan what I was able to find on it and put it on bitsavers in the next day or two.

The Computer History Museum would be interested in the machine, BTW.
 
[QUOTE
Good day
I am new in this forum. I was an early user of the Viatron machines. As manager of the Data Processing Centre of the Spanish Ministry of Education back in 1972 I had to solve a problem of data input for the Spanish National Library which consisted in that I need upper and lower cases for the alphabet and also all kink of accents and symbols besides the usual digits. I needed the full ASCII code which of course the punch card machines could not facilitate. The only solution I found at that time was the Viatron machines of which I bought a dozen and the increase the number as needs grew. The worked very fine, they had one of the first microchips available in the market. Programming was of course in pure assambler and the inconvenience was that the tape cassette used to register the data had a physical lateral growth that made that the standard music or data cassettes could not be used. And the Viatron cassetter were rather more expensive.
The Viatron data input machine had a full typing board, an alphanumerical screen that accepted all the ASCII character set and the cassette for registering the data input. Then there was a central processing unit for converting the cassettes in 7 or 9 tracks tape for input into the mainframe of the time, which my case was a Univac 1108
The problem with Viatron in those years of prevalence of big blue, more or less like today happens with MS was that the renting price of a Viatron machine was of only 19 USdollars per month per machine while the price of renting a punch card machine was aournd a minimal of 50 USdollars a month.
The circumstances of not enough capital, plus external pressures made the company go out of business sometime by 1974 or 1975.
If any one has a picture of the whole machine, I will be grateful.
 
In 1970, the MIS admin at our high school worked for Viatron and brought a terminal to the school. I immediately saw the capability of the Viatron to become a character generator for our CCTV system. This required a separate video board with genlock, which I helped spec and Viatron bread-boarded. They gave us a terminal with the genlock video board and we used it with our CCTV system at least until I graduated in 1973. I'd love to see one of these again!

-Larry
 
In 1970, I worked for CUC (Computer Usage Company), at that time, the oldest software house in the USA. CUC was contracted by the Viatron Company (Corporation?) to write a full FORTRAN IV compiler.

We wrote two FORTRAN compiler versions, and I don't recall what options or features were in each.

Viatron computers (at that time) came in two flavors (but I never saw a "real" one), a 2K word version and a 4K word. I think the word was 16 bits for the 2k version, 32 bits for the 4k version, making the versions 4k bytes or 16k bytes. I could be wrong on the word sizes. It could've been 8 bits and 16 bits. Also, the compilers were a one-pass compiler. Kingston FORTAN II for the IBM 1620 was also a one-pass compiler, and it worked in about 20K decimal digits, instructions for the IBM 1620 were 7 or 12 decimal digits, so a one-pass FORTRAN compiler is viable (for those of you non-believers).

The "compter(s)" we worked with were only available at the company in a northwest suburb of Boston (Reading?, Woburn?, Concord? ...) and there was no CRT terminal, only a "robot" with many solenoids (one for each each key on the keyboard for an IBM selectric typewriter) which was our console. It supported punched card reader and punching via an IBM 029 (it could've been an IBM 026 though). The robotic-type thingy for the typwriter was a bit slow, so most of the time we used punched cards and had the punched cards interpreted (by some other IBM machine). There was a real printer interface, but it never seemed to be working at the time we were allowed to use the "computer", which was (as I recall) somewhere around 8 pm to 4 am. We wrote the full FORTRAN IV compiler in 4K (no lie) with a pretty secretive macro language that a smart guy at CUC invented. The FORTAN IV compiler had single/double precision, logical, ... I don't remember if it had complex arithmetic or not. It was a fun project, and as I recall, we never got paid for it, even though the FORTRAN compiler passed the Viatron testing. Viatron was having much troubles paying their bills at this time, but we kept working on it as we thought that even if we didn't get paid, we could still sell the FORTAN IV compiler for other "PC computers or home computers". I believe they were also known as hobby computers. The price was to be $99 for the small version, $199 for the bigger version of the computer. The robotic typewriter (pounding away at the keys of the IBM selectric typewriter) was fun to watch. It was like watching an automobile with all the fenders, doors, hood, and body removed, just looking at the working parts. It looked like something a Hollywood studio would've made up for a Sci-Fi movie, but nobody would've believed that it would've worked, let alone be practicable. But there is was. Cassette tapes were used for the FORTRAN IV compiler and libraries, and I don't remember how we updated the source code for the FORTRAN IV compiler. FORTAN source was inputed via the IBM typewriter or via punched cards. For the testing, we used a standard bunch of routines/programs that were on cassette tapes (for speed and durability). The FORTAN IV compiler code was essentially 100%
"assembler" macros, and we had an IBM punched deck of the macros, which was run through the Viatron "operating system" to copy to cards to a cassette tape, and then
assembled" to a punched deck, and the deck written to a cassette tape. The punched cards could've been used as input, but paper cards break down after a while, and the IBM 029 "card reader" was too slow for loading a compiler. I was drooling over the thought of a $200 computer for my home, but alas, Viatron went belly-up.

____________________ Gerard Schildberger
 
I found this thread by accident.I have actual boards from a viation computer.
It was in a collection and I salvaged them from a scrap heap
I am looking for a place to donate or sell them
If somebody can tell me how to post photos Ill post them.
Bob
 
Bobt said:
If somebody can tell me how to post photos Ill post them.
Click to expand...
To post pictures,

1. Click the reply button.
2. Click on the little picture icon, which is right next to the movie clip icon.
3. Once the uploader comes up, click "select files."
4. Select the pictres that you want to upload.
5. Once you have selected them, click OK, then click "Upload Files."
6. It should automatically upload them into the reply.
 
It's interesting that back in the late 60's, the Viatron was being flogged by some as a "home computer". You know, keep your recipes online, etc. I remember reading a lot about it in Computerworld.

So in a way, the Viatron qualifies as one of the earliest "personal computers".
 
Over the past few weeks there has been a lot of discussion of the first “successful” computer; the Apple computer designed by Steve Jobs. I began to recall my short connection with Viatron. In the late 60s I worked part-time a few days a week doing rework on the circuit cards. Since Viatron actually was an integrated circuit manufacturer it was natural for them to be reducing the number of boards in their computer by condensing the ICs into denser, therefore fewer chips. If the business would have been able to survive they may have been the first to announce the microprocessor instead of Intel’s 4004 in 1971. And of course they were almost a decade ahead of Steve Jobs and the first Apple computer in 1976. It seems Viatron just didn’t have the savvy business model that Steve Jobs was able to pull off. So just like Augustus Moore Herring who flew before the Wright brothers did, Viatron is a name only known by few for what could have been.
 
Lots of examples of that, such as Lillenthal and Swan, which only goes to show that history is written by the people who write the textbooks.
 
Found this discussion through Google after hearing a mention of Viatron by Chuck Peddle (inventor of the 6502 processor) where he mentions Viatron in passing. Not so much about the hardware (which from above posts obviously worked), but about the business and (presumably) why it failed. Transcript of the section about Viatron:


"...he's a calculator guy, and he'd been working on a product called a Viatron terminal. Viatron was a scam about video terminals and we'll skip it for right now. Oh, it's very interesting history 'cause it - these guys were absolutely wrong, they said a whole bunch of things that were wrong. It was a big... a big, uh, stock fraud. But in fact it got all the semiconductor guys cranked up enough so that microprocessors came out of the hardware. So Tom came up with the idea that he wanted to make a microprocessor..."
Click to expand...


Source video is at http://blip.tv/file/4055830 and the above transcript is from just after 1 hour and 2 minutes in.

For those that are interested, the video is part 1 of 3 regarding the early days of CBM (Commodore). Note that the first 45 minutes are getting Skype to work for all parties. It contains some interesting titbits, but is mainly along the lines of "I can hear you now, but can't see you again. Do you think another restart might fix it?"
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top