Viatron

[olddataman]

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?

[davidjohnaustin]

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

[bob]

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

[Al Kossow]

We have some data on it in the Computer History Museum archives.
I'll see if we have anything on the computer.

[bob]

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 .

[Al Kossow]

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.

[Fpg]

[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.