Oric Nostalgia

The Tangerine years

Tangerine was formed in October 1979 by Dr. Paul Johnson and Barry Muncaster. They produced the "Microtan 65" computer. I don't have any details of it, but from the picture i've seen, it probably wasn't anything earth shattering. When originally designing the machine which later became the Oric-I, they were trying to make a machine for the executive desktop that could hook up to Prestel and Compute. More info on Tangerine and the Microtan 65 would be appreciated.

The Oric 1

In the early 80's, the people at Tangerine decided to enter the still young home computer market. In 1982 Oric Products international was incorperated and immediately started work on the Oric-1, with Tangerine acting as the research and development house for the new Oric company. The Oric-1 was announced in August of 1982. £129 would get you a 16k Oric-1 and £169.95 would get you the 48k version. The BASIC shipped with the Oric was flakey but functional. It had some unique features, most notably the inclusion of "ZAP", "SHOOT", "EXPLODE" and "PING" in addition to the usual BEEP style sound commands. Developers found it difficult to develop for the Oric, as they were very secretive about the technical details, and downright refused to give any indication of how to use the ROM routines directly or make direct use of the hardware.