RAIR was a very early UK manufacturer of 8085-based systems and eventually licensed its designs to ICL.
This obscure system was sold with a hard-disk and a 5"1/4 disk-drive built-in. It was conceived to be used as a multi-user system.
The following languages were available : Basic, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, PL/1.
More information about Black Box internal hardware in the ICL Personal computer page.
Pictured here is a model 3/30.
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Douro says:
This machine uses a Seagate st506 hard drive; I am quite certain that it could use many different drives through the interface.
John Pettitt adds:
Later black boxes were 8088 based and used hard disks up to 15MB.
RAIR was the first company in Europe to ship a 5.25 HD and the second world wide.
Mark Sharples reports:
The boards on this model would sometimes come free from the mother board during transit. The engineer would arrive from Rair, wait for the client to leave the room, and then simply drop the computer from about two inches off the desk to re-install the system.
We need more info about this computer ! If you designed, used, or have more info about this system,
please send us pictures or anything you might find useful.
I stumbled over this. The old days. We should probably plan an old get together with the crew. I see John and Tim commenting. What happened to Howard, Mark and Dave Fogden and the others? I have still lots of photos. Still a roll of poster from our hot-air balloon. What happened to "Technology For Business" after the bought us up. I remember they weren''t very happy about my balloon at the time. Is there a place we upload photos?
Thursday 7th April 2011
Guenter H Krauss (Germany)
Thanks John that was a sad time. Richard was my best friend then and still is. I have a lot of his stuff still in my loft, photos taken at rair and I think the first talking computer he was Woking on at the time. If I remember correctly he was in a race to beat the US in getting a chip to talk, something like that anyhow, I know little about this tech stuff. anybody know what happened to Richards home videos ?
Thursday 2nd August 2007
$#/\wN (essex UK)
I never met Rick - if I recall correctly he died the same week I started working for Lifeboat Associates (we shared offices with RAIR) - Tim may remember him.
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(France, july 82)
