The Oric-1 and Oric Atmos were [[6502]]-powered competitors to the 48kb [[ZX Spectrum]]. The Oric 1 has very much the same form factor, including calculator-style keys, but the Oric Atmos provides a full-travel keyboard.
Originally The Oric was originally one of the competitors for the contract to be the [[BBC Micro]] that was ultimately awarded to [[Acorn]]. The Oric machines were not successful in the UK during their commercial lifetime but obtained a dedicated following in France by luck: the Orics were the only machine in their price range to ship with an RGB output socket, which made them the only machine in their price range to be usable with French SECAM televisions, via their SCART(/Péritel) sockets. Fun fact: The name of the French software house [[Loriciel]] is a portmanteau of Oric and Logiciel (the french word for software). In January 1985, it was announced that the grand total number of Oric-1 and Oric Atmos units sold since 1983 was around 350 000. [https://www.quantum-bits.org/?p=5065 Source] == Hardware == The Oric retains used an unusual mixed text/graphics display mode that utilises inline colour attributes.
The Oric's display is 40 bytes across. Each of those bytes may be a control code (to change foreground or background colour, enable or disable graphics mode, etc) or actual content. While in text mode, the content is a character code and the character graphic is looked up indirectly. While in graphics mode, the content is a direct representation of the pixels on that line.
The Oric is also notable for shipping initially with a buggy ROM that made loading and saving from tape extremely unreliable. This was corrected in later manufacturing runs.
The Oric machines were not successful in the UK during their commercial lifetime but obtained a dedicated following in France by luck: the Orics were the only machine in their price range to ship with an RGB output socket, which made them the only machine in their price range to be usable with French SECAM televisions, via their SCART(/Peritel) sockets.
In January 1985, it was announced that the grand total number of Oric-1 and Oric Atmos units sold since 1983 was around 350 000. [https://www.quantum-bits.org/?p=5065 Source]
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