The Poly was a home/educational computer platform developed in New Zealand in the early 1980s. It was marketed to schools, but because it was prohibitively expensive and somewhat idiosyncratic, the main customers seem to have been the Australian Army and somebody in China.
Perhaps its most remarkable feature was its ability for networking, which seems to have used a protocol all of its own. For a year or two it may have been the most network capable home computer in the world, before 3Com thought to make Ethernet cards for the Apple II.
It was named after Wellington Polytechnic, where it was developed.
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Contributor: Tony Thompson
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 went to High School in New Zealand in the 80s. My school still had a computer lab with a dozen or so Poly 1 and a couple of Poly 2 computers. They were a strange looking machine, and very heavy. I remember the keyboards on the Poly 1 had copper plates at the sides to let you de-static yourself before using them. They were all networked, and shared a central "server" which looked like a large box with a couple of 8" floppy disk drives. The shared printers also plugged into the "server". Software was very simple - I remember a very basic word processor, and we were taught Pascal on it.
One of the guys I went to school with is trying to preserve and document information about these machines: http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/homepages/andrew/poly/Poly.htm
