Tatung Einstein

The Tatung Einstein was a home and small business microcomputer released in the United Kingdom in 1984, where it sold for 500 pounds. Tatung, a Taiwanese electronics and home appliance company, designed and manufactured the TC-01 model in England. The machine was built around a Zilog Z80 processor running at 4 MHz, with 64 kilobytes of main memory, 16 kilobytes of video memory and 8 kilobytes of ROM. Its graphics offered 256 by 192 pixels, 32 sprites and 16 colours, and it had a built-in 3-inch disk drive of the type also used by Sinclair and Amstrad. It ran the MOS operating system, and disk-loaded software such as the CP/M-compatible Xtal-DOS and Xtal-BASIC, both written by Crystal Computers of Torquay, let it run business programs including dBase II and WordStar. The Einstein was not a commercial success, but software developers liked it, and many software houses used it as a platform for writing game code before porting that code to the final retail machines.