Microcomputers Made in West Germany

Abstract

West Germany never produced a Commodore or an Apple, but between 1974 and the late 1990s it built, assembled and sold a wide range of small computers: magazine kits and learning systems, the first German eight-bit machines of 1977 to 1979, Apple clones from Münster, Commodores assembled in Braunschweig, Amstrads sold under the Schneider name, Siemens office PCs, and in 1997 the Aldi PC that queues formed for. This article tells that story; East Germany’s parallel development is covered in Computing in East Germany, and the earlier pioneers, including the MCS-40 of 1975, in The First Personal Computers.

Kits and Learning Systems

The electronics magazine Elektor, the German edition of the Dutch Elektuur, published construction plans for a “Computer 74” built from Texas Instruments 7400-series logic chips in 1974, and in 1977 a do-it-yourself version of National Semiconductor’s SC/MP microprocessor kit, on which hobbyists played Mastermind and Lunar Lander. In 1977 the Berlin firm Micronic Computer Systeme (MCS), founded the year before by three graduates, brought out the Alpha 1, the first German eight-bit computer: a MOS 6502 on a card, one kilobyte of RAM, a hexadecimal keypad and display, and two cassette recorders for data, with an operating system called MONA by the physicist Bernhard Korsch and hardware by Bernd Strößner. Assembled it cost 1,800 marks, as a kit less than a thousand; about four hundred finished machines and many kits were sold, mostly to workshops and laboratories.

In 1980 Elektor published Alois Nachtmann’s Junior-Computer, a 6502 board modelled on the KIM-1 that readers soldered together for a few hundred marks; books on it appeared in six languages, and several thousand were built across Europe, more than the KIM-1 itself (see Chuck Peddle). Television followed: after the BBC’s Computer Programme of 1982 and the NDR’s build-along Klein-Computer of 1984, the WDR broadcast six episodes of Bit und Byte – Wir bauen einen Computer from 14 August 1985, built around a learning computer by two Düsseldorf physics teachers, Burkhard John and Volker Ludwig. It used Motorola’s MC14500B industrial control chip, which processed exactly one bit, understood fourteen instructions and sold as a kit for 150 marks; school classes watched the series and could earn a “computer certificate.”

The First Series Machines

Three German eight-bit computers came out in 1979. In April Siemens launched the PC 100, derived from Rockwell’s AIM 65 single-board computer. In Karlsruhe the Steinmetz Krischke Systemtechnik (SKS) built the KISS (“keep it simple, stupid”), an Intel 8085A machine in a bright orange case with an operating system by Helmut Wiertalla’s software team, sold in small numbers from the summer of 1979. From September it was made in Nuremberg by Diehl Datensysteme, which Triumph-Adler had taken over in 1978, as the Alphatronic P1, with 16 kilobytes and a minifloppy drive for 3,595 marks plus VAT; the P2 followed in 1980, the P3 and P4 in 1982, and in 1983 a Japanese-assembled Alphatronic PC for 1,495 marks. Kontron of Eching near Munich presented the PSI 80 in 1979: a Z80A machine with 32 to 80 kilobytes, an 80-column screen and up to two disk drives, priced at around 10,000 marks.

In Münster Sigrid and Manfred Lettenmayer founded Basis Microcomputer in 1977, imported the IMSAI and Cromemco and became Apple’s first German distributor; an Apple II with disk drive and monitor cost 7,840 marks in 1979. When Apple took over European distribution in 1981, Basis built its own Apple II-compatible machine, the Basis 108, launched in January 1982 with both a 6502 and a Z80 for CP/M in an aluminium case, for 4,345 marks without drives. Basis sold three thousand by the end of 1982, but a production venture in West Berlin collapsed in insolvency in September 1983.

Commodore in Braunschweig

Commodore had sold in West Germany since 1971 through a subsidiary in Dreieich near Frankfurt. In 1980 it began production in an empty factory in Braunschweig, chosen partly because the nearby Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt was a good customer with some four hundred Commodore machines; women assembled boards shipped from Hong Kong into CBM office computers, C64s and disk drives (see Jack Tramiel and Commodore). The German branch was one of Commodore’s profitable parts, and when the parent company went bankrupt on 29 April 1994, Braunschweig carried on until the supply of chips from Asia dried up; the Commodore Büromaschinen GmbH filed for bankruptcy in September 1994.

The C64 was the machine of the West German home-computer boom. About 200,000 home computers were sold in 1983, and in October 1984 the consumer magazine test of the Stiftung Warentest compared seven of them. Tandy’s Color Computer failed the high-voltage safety test, the Colour Genie had miserable picture quality, the ZX Spectrum was marked down for its rubber keys, and only the TI-99/4A, already withdrawn from sale, and the Commodore 64, at an average price of 700 marks, were rated good. The testers added that apart from games and learning BASIC they knew of no household task a small computer did better than the traditional way.

Schneider and Amstrad

From 1984 the Schneider Rundfunkwerke of Türkheim in Bavaria sold Alan Sugar’s British Amstrad computers under their own name. The Schneider CPC 464, with a Z80, 64 kilobytes, a built-in cassette drive and its own monitor, cost 899 marks and was named computer of the year; the PCW 8256 word processor became the “Joyce” for 2,490 marks, about a third of an IBM PC set up for writing, and the PC 1512 followed. In March 1988 the partners split. Schneider’s own Euro PC, announced on 29 February 1988, put a Siemens-made 8088 clocked at nearly 10 MHz, 512 kilobytes and a disk drive into the keyboard case, ran MS-DOS 3.3, and cost 1,298 marks with a monochrome monitor; it reached third place among PCs sold in Germany. (One HNF account says it was developed in cooperation with Commodore, another calls it Schneider’s own design.) Rising production costs ended the success, and Schneider Technologies became insolvent in 2002.

Siemens and Nixdorf

The first German computer in the IBM PC class was the Siemens PC-X of 1982, with Intel’s 80186, up to one megabyte of memory, a ten-megabyte hard disk option and Siemens’s Unix derivative Sinix. Its twin, the PC-D of 1984, ran MS-DOS but was not very compatible with other MS-DOS machines; it cost 9,390 to 17,990 marks, gained a mouse and Digital Research’s GEM interface in 1985 and a design prize in 1986. Siemens gave one to Konrad Zuse for his 75th birthday in 1985, though he had just told Der Spiegel that he himself did not need a computer. In 1990 Siemens merged its computer business with Nixdorf (see Heinz Nixdorf), and its PCs were sold under the Siemens Nixdorf name.

The Aldi PC

Aldi had sold Commodore home computers since 1986. In November 1997 Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd offered a Pentium PC from the Essen firm Medion for 1,798 marks: 166 MHz, 32 megabytes of memory, a 2.1-gigabyte disk and a CD-ROM drive. It sold out within hours, and in April 1998 the two chains sold 100,000 in three days. In March 2000 a “multimedia internet PC” with a 667 MHz Pentium III and a fax modem followed; by then the competition had caught up, and the Aldi PC was no longer a bargain. One stands today in a display window of the Haus der Geschichte in Bonn, another in the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum.