Fifty Years Ago .... from the pages of Computer Weekly

24th July 1975 computing, compiled by TNMOC volunteer archivist, Brian Aldous.

A selection of stories from Computer Weekly from 24th July 1975. The full archive of Computer Weekly can be seen at TNMOC, where there are special rolling displays of front pages from 25 and 40 years ago.

Trivector develops micro based on 8080: Industrial process control and scientific data acquisition are the two main application areas seen for the System 80 microprocessor system now being built and sold by Trivector Systems Ltd of Henlow, Bedfordshire, a firm set up a few months ago by three ex-Digico leading lights, Alan Ball, Chris Blake and Les Price.

Managing director of Trivector, Alan Ball, who was general sales manager of Digico until a year ago, told Computer Weekly that his company will concentrate on these small specialist applications areas rather than taking on big risky turnkey projects. The only other market sector to be entered in the near future will be education. The Trivector System 80 is based on the highly successful Intel 8080 and costs £952 in its basic form, including a control panel, but not including any memory, which costs £240 per 4K increment, and can be expanded up to 16K. Trivector quotes around £3,500 for a complete 16K system with a teletype or VDU interface and a fully interfaced floppy disc system. Trivector technical director, Les Price, who was engineering manager at Digico, and research director, Chris Blake, former Digico programming manager, lead a team at Trivector’s plant at Henlow, which at present comprises just 10 software and engineering experts. They are working on three quite different customer systems. One is a complete data acquisition and analysis set-up for processing data from two gas chromatography units, one gel permeation unit, one ultraviolet spectrophotometer, one disc centrifuge and one tensile tester, all linked to a single System 80. (CW 455 24/7/1975 p7)