The first mass market usable home computer, well, let's be honest here, the first computer that could be built and used for something by a reasonably determined enthusiast, was the MITS Altair, the design of which was presented in the American magazine Popular Electronics in January 1975. It had been developed by Edward Roberts, William Yates and Jim Bybee over the previous two years and it burst upon the nerdish world rather like a new sun.

The important point to note about the Altair was that it promised far more than it ever delivered. However, that really didn't matter to the hobbyists who bought it. The computer was sold by the thousand as a kit and the designers' company, MITS, mushroomed. The microcomputer boom had started.

By the end of 1976, though, MITS was in serious financial trouble and the founders were looking for someone to take it off their hands. Come May 1977 and a white knight was seen on the horizon bearing six million dollars. The white knight went by the name of Pertec.

From the first, the merger does not seem to have been a happy one. Pertec's expertise lay in developing peripherals for the major manufacturers such as IBM. They worked to detailed plans and produced clear documentation on all their products because if they didn't, their customers wouldn't pay them. The MITS people came from a more relaxed environment and there seems to have been a major culture clash. Before long, the MITS people were leaving.

Pertec moved design much more towards the business end of the spectrum by combining the last MITS computer design, the 8800b, with their own eight inch floppy disk sub-system. This slightly Frankensteinian monster was introduced as the MITS 300/25 Small Business System. Basically, it was a desk supported by a very large blue box that contained the electronics. All you had to do was place a dumb terminal on top of the desk, hook it up to the computer and you were ready to go.

If the blue box contained a fourteen inch hard disk drive, it became the MITS 300/55 Small Business System. It was still neither pretty nor small but it did provide the user with an 'enormous' 10 million bytes of storage!

Capable as they were, these things looked just a little on the bulky side next to the Apple II, Commodore Pet and Tandy TRS-80 that were beginning to dominate the small business market. By 1978 Pertec seems to have given up on the MITS name and were looking to build something just a little snappier. The result was an amazing piece of engineering called the PCC-2000.

If the intention had been to make a machine that was as compact as the Apple, Pertec certainly fluffed it. A PCC-2000 consisted of a card cage, two eight inch floppy disk drivers and a twelve inch green phospor display, all in a metal casing of considerable structural integrity, which was permanently linked to a very good and extremely solid keyboard by a heavy duty cable. The whole thing weighed over a hundred pounds and really took two men to move it. Petite it was not.

There could be no doubting the quality of the components or the construction. The PCC-2000 was beautifully made to the highest standards. The screen was a cut well above the, frankly, mediocre offerings from Commodore or Radio Shack and the keyboard was a delight to use. Moreover, these machines were reliable. You switched them on and they worked. It didn't matter how often or how far you moved them, they just worked. If you didn't live through the early days of micro-computing, you have no idea just how unusual that was.

Technically, the machine owed as much to mini-computer design as to its MITS micro-computer heritage. The basic processor was an 8085, which lived in splendour on its own board in the cage. This had a page controller that allowed the 8085 to adress up to 1MB of RAM in 16KB blocks. Other boards carried memory, in blocks of up to 64KB. Given that Pertec sold the PCC-2000 as a system computer, which could support up to four additional users on dumb terminals, the supplier would typically fit two or three RAM boards.

A second 8085 controlled yet another board, which was dedicated to all I/O, including the keyboard, screen, disks and, of course, the serial MUX, which handled the 4 optional external terminals. To use the fourteen inch dual disk drive, which gave you five megabytes of fixed storage and five megabytes removable, required a further controller board.

On the software front, Pertec supplied an odd, multi-user operating system called MTX, for which there were the standard (American) ledgers available and some not very sophisticated office packages such as word processing. The default programming language was a variety of Business BASIC but there were also compilers for COBOL, Fortran and Pascal. A single user version of MTX was supplied, mainly for developers, and CP/M was also available, as another alternative operating system, which provided access to packages like Wordstar and Supercalc.

By the standards of the time, the PCC-2000 was an exceptionally complete package. The only accessories of note were the previously mentioned disk drives and dumb terminals, as well as a choice of two printers.

The printers were both sourced from industry leaders. Centronics supplied a very fast and incredibly noisy dot matrix printer. With 132 column output and even some limited graphics capability, this was pretty cutting edge for the end of the 'seventies. Despite the noise, the Centronics was remarkably reliable and very fast.

For word processing, the NEC SpinWriter was supplied. This used a rotating head around the periphery of which, the characters were arranged. To print each letter, a black carbon tape was raised over the paper, the wheel rotated to position the required character and a hammer mechanism forced the character against the tape, leaving a very sharp impression on the paper. Known as a “daisy wheel printer”, the Spinwriter represented the height of quality output for the time, although a speed of 20 characters per second left something to be desired, if you had a large mailing list to process.

It was generally accepted that customers would buy both printers, the dot matrix Centronics for accounting and the SpinWriter for correspondence. As a result, the I/O board, mentioned above, had sockets for both types.

The PCC-2000's quality of construction would be hard to overstate. From the luxurious keyboard, which rivalled that on IBM's Selectric typewriters, to the wonderfully sharp display, Pertec's machine simply oozed quality. The problem was that Rolls-Royce construction came at a Rolls-Royce price and that was just too much for the market.

At £5,000 on the British market and somewhere north of $12,000 in the U.S., this was an awfull lot of machine for an awfull lot of money. By the time you'd added a disk drive at much the same price as the computer, a couple of terminals and both printers, there'd be very little change out of £16,000 / $35,000, which was pretty much taking you back into minicomputer territory. Worse still, Apple could get you to more or less the same place for, say, £6,000 / $14,000.

Over the Channel, in France, the PCC-2000 was rebadged by the Ordisor company (part of the Sofragem group). It's not known if they were any more successful than Pertec themselves at selling the system but subsequent events suggest not.

In retrospect, it appears obvious that Pertec had overestimated what the market would bear for a machine in this class and they paid dearly for that mistake. Taken over by one time customer Triumph-Addler, they gradually sank into obscurity. In the U.K., the stock was remaindered off at knock down prices (see below) and Pertec's foray onto the desktop petered out, or nearly.

With their new parent, they made one last attempt at the small business arena, launching the Motorolla 68000 based model 3000. This machine was intended to run Unix for small companies but, once again, Pertec was running too far ahead of the market and like its predecessor, the 3000 was less than spectacularly successfull.

My personal introduction to the PCC-2000 came when I was asked to find a computer for the small Devonian company I was then working for. In an issue of Wireless World I came across an advertisement offering PCC-2000s at knock-down prices, if I recall correctly, about half the going rate for a Commodore Pet.

A few 'phone calls later and my boss and I were trecking across southern England to a little village in Kent to view them. The vendor turned out to have bought the entire UK stock from the importer. My boss made the decision to buy three of the computers and two disk drives.

We returned the following week with two large estate cars and picked up the kit. We barely got it all in. A long drive home later, we unpacked the computers, stuck them on desks and voila! Three glowing phosphor screens complete with input prompts. Which led us to the next problem, what were we going to run on them?

It soon became obvious that the software that came with the Pertecs was never going to meet our needs, even though we had the source code. It was just too American in style to be acceptable to the British authorities. The Company Secretary took one look at the screens and sample printouts. With only the briefest of pauses, she delivered a straight-forward “No!”

This left us with a great deal of hardware and very little to use on it. (Well, I did find a surprisingly good “Space Invaders” on the MTX disk and we had a small tournament running but my boss, understandably, was less than happy at the prospect of having spent company money on a games machine). I was told to find a solution and to find it fast.

Luckily, there was a quick fix, if we were prepared to pay for it. I happened to know that BOS had ben ported to the Pertec and it seemed like exactly what the company needed. BOS was a laudable British attempt to build a completely portable operating system for micro and mini computers. Remember, at this time there were new computers coming out, it sometimes seemed, every week and every one of them had a different operating system. BOS would not only work across a surprisingly wide range of machines, it was establishing itself as the industry standard for mid-range accounting systems in the UK as well.

We visited BOS's headquarters in Saffron Hill, London to discuss the matter. This resulted in my employer, who was never one to miss an opportunity for profit, deciding that he could see a market here and, rather to my amazement, we became BOS dealers for the far south-west of England.

In the event, the marriage of the PCC-2000 to BOS was a very happy one. We bought up the remainder of the stock (getting it shipped professionaly - none of us fancied trying to shift that lot in cars) and settled down to sell systems in Devon and Somerset. Eventually we also sold some Sirius based systems (the Sirius was the English version of Chuck Peddlar's Victor computer) and I got to do some interesting programming in BOS/MicroCobol, on a PCC-2000 that lived under the stairs in our little house.

The bottom line was that the PCC-2000 was an excellent machine that was just too expensive. As our experience proved, at the right price the PCC-2000 would sell well. The problem was, the right price was just a fraction of what they cost to make.