This mini forum is intended to provide a simple means of discussion about the ABS Computer  ORB computer. If you want to share your own experience or memories, or add relevant information about this system: post a message! For other purposes like sales messages, hardware & software questions or information requests, please use our main forum.

I worked for ABS for a period in 1984, and quite a bit of my time was supporting the Orb.

Slight correction on the above - there was a choice of eight colours, and yes the fire brigade did apparently buy one because nobody else produced a fire-engine-red computer.

The Orb had one major failure: the more terminals connected, and the more those terminals were doing, the worse the chance of an "Uninitialised Interrupt" which would freeze the whole box. I don''t believe an 8-terminal rig ever worked - we had a 4-terminal setup in our office and that was about the limit. During the summer of 84 I was sent off on a long tour of dealers to upgrade the firmware of their Orbs. Along with this was a set of release notes, and no I don''t still have a copy of these, but the notes contained the following magnificent paragraph:

"Uninitialised Interrupts: The Orb no longer suffers from Uninitialised Interrupts. In future they will be referred to as "Unexpected Interrupts".

To be fair, these now only froze one screen, so you could shout out for everyone in the office to save their work before rebooting the machine, but still...

The Orb was the eventual downfall of ABS. Dealers around the country signed up as dealers on the basis of receiving telephone calls form people saying that they would like to buy an Orb, and were they a dealer? Eventually it emerged that these calls had actually come from people in the sales department of ABS.... I only discovered this during a later interview (I didn''t get the job, but they suggested that having ABS on my cv was probably a limiting move).

Oh, and the hook line for the Orb? "The All-round Personal Computer". *Sigh*.

I worked at Shortlands, and remember them around the office, I really wished I had snagged one then.
I remember people saying they had overheating issues, and caught on fire, but i never saw it.
The Shortlands building has now been converted to a church.

"Interesting system! early imac?"\

Um.. HELL NO. Do any of these still exist? or are they extinct???

Interesting system! early imac?