This computer had an integrated dot printer which can print on 40 to 132 columns at 120 cps, a 12" color graphic monitor and a dual 5" disc drives. A lot of cards were designed to be placed into the three expansion slots: an 8" disk controler, centronics interface, IEEE488 port, ADC/DAC card or ram expansion (64 or 128 KB).
A bit of trivia: the video card has its own Z80 CPU.
Apparently this computer was marketed by BMC outside Japan.
Alexander Velin says :
There is OKI if 800 model 50, which is based on 8086, has 256 KB ram, spare keyboard, one 8" 560 KB floppy, 7 MB HDD. Mine has a MS DOS 1.15 on it...
More technical information from Bruce Grant:
I serviced IF-800's in the early 1980's.
The printer was a 7 pin matrix mechanically related to the Oki Microline 82 but largely software driven. It was a frightful device.
Both colour and monochrome screens were offered, and were excellent. The colour monitor had, as I recall, three seperate banks of 16K of RAM, one for each of the primary colours, providing an early form of 24-bit colour. Power for the main unit was provided through the monitor. Two people were needed to safely carry the colour monitor.
The floppy disks were made by YE-Data and offered good capacity for the time - in the order of 500KB. They were of the solenoid head loading type and were ponderously slow but generally quite reliable.
CP/M 2.2 and a standalone version of MS-Basic were supplied. Each system used its own disk format. Sadly, these were not interchangeable. Bitmapped graphics were implemented through the MS-Basic system only, as were the bezel-mounted screen "hotkeys".
The IF-800 was crippled commercially by appearing on the market at the same time as the IBM PC-XT, which cost slightly less as I recall.
They were distributed in Canada by Canada Computer of Markham, Ontario.
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.
Please consider donating your old computer / videogame system to Old-Computers.com or one of our partners from anywhere in the world (Europe, America, Asia, etc.).
I was involved in a project to implement TurbDos on these machines. Yes it did have three blocks of video ram, but it was still one bit per bank, per pixel so you still only have 8 colours. The graphics library supplied supported dithering to create a greater colour palette.
Sunday 25th March 2012
Karl Leaning (Auckland New Zealand)
I found a USA advertisement for this BMC computer in a 1981 issue of Byte magazine. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-04/page/n117/mode/2up
Wednesday 2nd September 2020
Adrian Pearson (USA)
When I was with Patfinder computers these were introduced and used for training at Comptrain
Friday 4th November 2016
Aleem (Pakistan)
NAME
IF 800
MANUFACTURER
OKI
TYPE
Professional Computer
ORIGIN
Japan
YEAR
1982
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
None
KEYBOARD
Full-stroke keyboard with separated numeric keypad
CPU
Zilog Z80 A
SPEED
5 mHz
RAM
64 KB / 128 KB / 256 KB
VRAM
192 KB (3 blocks of 64 KB)
ROM
Unknown
TEXT MODES
20 x 25 / 24 x 80
GRAPHIC MODES
640 x 400 / 640 x 200
COLORS
8. Also available in monochrome version (8 shades)
SOUND
1 voice - 5 octaves
SIZE / WEIGHT
Unknown
I/O PORTS
RS232c, light pen, ROM cartridge (20 KB), Tape, 4 x I/O Slots, 3 x accessory slots
BUILT IN MEDIA
Two 360 KB - 5.25'' FDD. Optional 16 MB H.D. and 6.3 MB removable cartridge