VideoBrain Family Computer

~ the last words ~

Umtech was a Sunnyvale company run by people who had just left the chip industry. Albert Yu came out of Intel and David Chung had led the Fairchild F8 work, which is the processor they then put in their own machine. The New York Times noticed them on 14 December 1977, describing a 500 dollar "video brain" that plugged into a television and would reach department stores the following month.

It did, roughly. The machine went to the winter CES in Las Vegas that January, got a demonstration slot on NBC's Today show on 10 February, and reached the sales floor at Macy's in San Francisco a couple of weeks later. For a short stretch of 1978 it was the cheapest computer in the American press.

Five hundred dollars bought a black wedge with a cartridge slot, one kilobyte of memory and four joystick ports. What it did not buy was a way to write a program. There was no BASIC in the machine and no BASIC cartridge, only a red key marked MASTER CONTROL and a thirty six key keyboard with the numbers doubled onto the letters, in an order that belonged to no typewriter ever built.

Apple's Mike Markkula was asked about it by Business Week in March 1978 and said he did not count the VideoBrain as a home computer, because the user could not program it and it had no real storage. He was right, and Umtech had chosen it deliberately. They built a sealed appliance that loaded software from cartridges, which is roughly the thesis Apple itself would sell a decade later, and they shipped it to a market still made mostly of hobbyists.

~ the record ~

~ what the cartridges were ~

Seventeen titles came out. Six of them were education, from Math Tutor to a Lemonade Stand, and the entertainment half ran to Pinball and a gladiator game with a few hundred variations in it. The last pair were household finance, Money Minder and Financier, which tells you who Umtech thought was buying.

Two expander boxes hung off the single expansion port. The first added cassette storage and two serial ports, and the second was a 300 baud acoustic modem that only did anything with the Timeshare cartridge, which turned the machine into a terminal for somebody else's computer. Both sold in tiny numbers.

~ the language that came too late ~

There was eventually one way to program a VideoBrain. APL/S, a stripped down APL with proper loops and conditionals bolted on, was designed in 1978 by Robert G. Brown and sold as a cartridge, and Brown wrote it up in BYTE in December 1979. Fewer than a hundred of those cartridges were ever made, and by the month that article ran the hardware was already being dumped by a liquidator.

~ the liquidator ~

Macy's California had been the whole distribution strategy, with four units on the main floor and a staged home computer room on the sixth for serious buyers. Business Week went to look in March 1978 and reported that the San Francisco store had sold six machines in two days. The buyer, Robert C. Frey, told the magazine the thing he was worried about: "We don't want to take back 500 of these things."

Manufacturing stopped in March 1979, and the trade paper Electronic News ran the output halt and the staff cuts on 23 April. By December a Minneapolis mail-order liquidator was advertising the 500 dollar system in Popular Mechanics at 164 dollars with three cartridges thrown in, the expander cut from 170 to 85, and a line telling readers to order spare cartridges now because the rest were going to dealers as soon as the sale ended.

No bankruptcy filing has ever turned up. The company was backed by a Hong Kong family business rather than by venture capital, and the most detailed account of the ending, written years later by people who worked there, has it quietly folded back into that backer. One collector history puts total production at around 5,500 machines.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »