MICRAL
Encyclopedia
According to the Computer History Museum
, the Micral N, produced by the French
company R2E, was the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computer
based on a microprocessor
(in this case, the Intel 8008
).
R2E founder André Truong Trong Thi
(EFREI
degree, Paris), a French immigrant from Vietnam
, asked Frenchman François Gernelle to develop the Micral N computer for the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique
(INRA), starting in June 1972. Alain Perrier of INRA was looking for a computer for process control in his crop evapotranspiration
measurements. The software was developed by Benchetrit, with Alain Lacombe and Jean-Claude Beckmann working on the electrical and mechanical aspects. Gernelle invented the Micral N, which was much smaller than existing minicomputer
s, soon named in 1973 for the first time: "microcomputer".
The computer was to be delivered in December 1972, and Gernelle, Lacombe, Benchetrit and Beckmann had to work in a cellar in Châtenay-Malabry
for 18 hours a day in order to deliver the computer in time. The software was written on an Intertechnique Multi-8 minicomputer using a cross-assembler. The computer was based on an Intel 8008 microprocessor clocked at 500 kHz. It had a backplane
bus, called the Pluribus with 74-pin connector. 14 boards could be plugged in a Pluribus. With two Pluribus, the Micral N could support up to 24 boards. The computer used MOS memory instead of core. The Micral N could support parallel and serial input-output. It had 8 levels of interrupt
and a stack
. The computer was programmed with perforated cards, and used a teleprinter
as output. It was delivered to the INRA in January 1973, and commercialized in February 1973 for FF 8,500 (about $1,750) making it a cost-effective replacement for minicomputers which augured the era of the PC.
France had produced the first microcomputer
. A year would pass before the first North American microcomputer, SCELBI
, was advertised in the March 1974 issue of QST
, an amateur radio magazine.
Indeed, INRA was originally planning to use PDP-8
computers for process control
, but the Micral N could do the same for a fifth of the cost. An 8-inch floppy disk
reader was added to the Micral in December 1973, following a command of the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique
. This was made possible by the pile-canal, a buffer that could accept one megabyte per second. In 1974, a keyboard and screen were fitted to the Micral computers. A hard disk (first made by CAELUS then by Diablo
) became available in 1975. In 1979, the Micral 8031 D was equipped with a 5" 1/4 inches hard disk of 5 Megabytes made by Seagate
.
The following Micral computers successively used the Intel 8080
at 1 MHz (Micral G and Micral S), Zilog Z80
(Micral CZ) and Intel 8088
as microprocessors. The Micral M was a multiprocessor. The original SYSMIC operating system was renamed Prologue in 1978. Interestingly, Prologue was able to perform real-time
multitasking
, and was a multi-user
system. The last Micral designed by François Gernelle was the 9020. In 1981, R2E was bought by Groupe Bull
. Starting with the Bull Micral 30, which could use both Prologue and MS-DOS
, Groupe Bull transformed the Micral computers into a line of PC compatibles. François Gernelle left Bull in 1983.
Truong's R2E sold about 90,000 units of the Micral that were mostly used in vertical application
s such as highway toll booths and process control.
Litigation followed after Truong started claiming that he alone invented the first personal computer. The courts did not judge in favor of Truong, who was declared "the businessman, but not the inventor", giving in 1998 the sole claim as inventor of the first personal computer to Gernelle and the R2E engineering team.
In the mid-1970s, Philippe Kahn
was a programmer for the Micral. Kahn later headed Borland
which released blockbusters Turbo Pascal
and SideKick
in 1983.
: Data processing system, specially for real-time applications: Channel for exchanging information between a computer and rapid peripheral units (pile-canal)
Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, USA. The Museum is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age, and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on our lives.-History:The museum's origins...
, the Micral N, produced by the French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
company R2E, was the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computer
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
based on a microprocessor
Microprocessor
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...
(in this case, the Intel 8008
Intel 8008
The Intel 8008 was an early byte-oriented microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel and introduced in April 1972. It was an 8-bit CPU with an external 14-bit address bus that could address 16KB of memory...
).
R2E founder André Truong Trong Thi
André Truong Trong Thi
André Trương Trọng Thi was a Vietnamese-French engineer. He is considered to be the "father of the personal computer" for his company creating thanks to the french inventor of this machine François Gernelle, the Micral N based on an Intel 8008 processor, soon named in 1973 for the first time:...
(EFREI
EFREI
EFREI is a French private engineering school located in Villejuif, Île-de-France, at the south of Paris. Its courses, specializing in computer science and management, are taught with support from the state...
degree, Paris), a French immigrant from Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
, asked Frenchman François Gernelle to develop the Micral N computer for the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique
Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique
The Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique is a French public research institute dedicated to scientific studies surrounding the problems of agriculture...
(INRA), starting in June 1972. Alain Perrier of INRA was looking for a computer for process control in his crop evapotranspiration
Evapotranspiration
Evapotranspiration is a term used to describe the sum of evaporation and plant transpiration from the Earth's land surface to atmosphere. Evaporation accounts for the movement of water to the air from sources such as the soil, canopy interception, and waterbodies...
measurements. The software was developed by Benchetrit, with Alain Lacombe and Jean-Claude Beckmann working on the electrical and mechanical aspects. Gernelle invented the Micral N, which was much smaller than existing minicomputer
Minicomputer
A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...
s, soon named in 1973 for the first time: "microcomputer".
The computer was to be delivered in December 1972, and Gernelle, Lacombe, Benchetrit and Beckmann had to work in a cellar in Châtenay-Malabry
Châtenay-Malabry
Châtenay-Malabry is a commune in the southwestern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located 10.8 km from the center of Paris.The commune includes the valley la vallée aux loups with green forests and pretty houses including the estate of French writer Chateaubriand. It also includes the Butte...
for 18 hours a day in order to deliver the computer in time. The software was written on an Intertechnique Multi-8 minicomputer using a cross-assembler. The computer was based on an Intel 8008 microprocessor clocked at 500 kHz. It had a backplane
Backplane
A backplane is a group of connectors connected in parallel with each other, so that each pin of each connector is linked to the same relative pin of all the other connectors forming a computer bus. It is used as a backbone to connect several printed circuit boards together to make up a complete...
bus, called the Pluribus with 74-pin connector. 14 boards could be plugged in a Pluribus. With two Pluribus, the Micral N could support up to 24 boards. The computer used MOS memory instead of core. The Micral N could support parallel and serial input-output. It had 8 levels of interrupt
Interrupt
In computing, an interrupt is an asynchronous signal indicating the need for attention or a synchronous event in software indicating the need for a change in execution....
and a stack
Stack (data structure)
In computer science, a stack is a last in, first out abstract data type and linear data structure. A stack can have any abstract data type as an element, but is characterized by only three fundamental operations: push, pop and stack top. The push operation adds a new item to the top of the stack,...
. The computer was programmed with perforated cards, and used a teleprinter
Teleprinter
A teleprinter is a electromechanical typewriter that can be used to communicate typed messages from point to point and point to multipoint over a variety of communication channels that range from a simple electrical connection, such as a pair of wires, to the use of radio and microwave as the...
as output. It was delivered to the INRA in January 1973, and commercialized in February 1973 for FF 8,500 (about $1,750) making it a cost-effective replacement for minicomputers which augured the era of the PC.
France had produced the first microcomputer
Microcomputer
A microcomputer is a computer with a microprocessor as its central processing unit. They are physically small compared to mainframe and minicomputers...
. A year would pass before the first North American microcomputer, SCELBI
SCELBI
SCELBI Computer Consulting was a personal-computer hardware and software manufacturer located in Milford, Connecticut. It was founded in 1973 by Nat Wadsworth and Bob Findley. Initially, they sold hardware based on the first 8-bit microprocessor from Intel, the 8008...
, was advertised in the March 1974 issue of QST
QST
QST is a magazine for amateur radio enthusiasts, published by the American Radio Relay League . It is a membership journal that is included in membership with the ARRL. The publisher claims that circulation of QST in the United States is higher than all amateur radio-related publications in the...
, an amateur radio magazine.
Indeed, INRA was originally planning to use PDP-8
PDP-8
The 12-bit PDP-8 was the first successful commercial minicomputer, produced by Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1960s. DEC introduced it on 22 March 1965, and sold more than 50,000 systems, the most of any computer up to that date. It was the first widely sold computer in the DEC PDP series of...
computers for process control
Process control
Process control is a statistics and engineering discipline that deals with architectures, mechanisms and algorithms for maintaining the output of a specific process within a desired range...
, but the Micral N could do the same for a fifth of the cost. An 8-inch floppy disk
Floppy disk
A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier lined with fabric that removes dust particles...
reader was added to the Micral in December 1973, following a command of the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique
Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique
The Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives or CEA, is a French “public establishment related to industrial and commercial activities” whose mission is to develop all applications of nuclear power, both civilian and military...
. This was made possible by the pile-canal, a buffer that could accept one megabyte per second. In 1974, a keyboard and screen were fitted to the Micral computers. A hard disk (first made by CAELUS then by Diablo
Diablo Data Systems
Diablo Data Systems was a division of Xerox created by the acquisition of Diablo Systems Inc. in 1972.It is best known for the Diablo 630 daisywheel printer, but also produced the hard disk drives that were resold by DEC as the RK02 and RK03....
) became available in 1975. In 1979, the Micral 8031 D was equipped with a 5" 1/4 inches hard disk of 5 Megabytes made by Seagate
Seagate Technology
Seagate Technology is one of the world's largest manufacturers of hard disk drives. Incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology, Seagate is currently incorporated in Dublin, Ireland and has its principal executive offices in Scotts Valley, California, United States.-1970s:On November 1, 1979...
.
The following Micral computers successively used the Intel 8080
Intel 8080
The Intel 8080 was the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel and was released in April 1974. It was an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibility...
at 1 MHz (Micral G and Micral S), Zilog Z80
Zilog Z80
The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed by Zilog and sold from July 1976 onwards. It was widely used both in desktop and embedded computer designs as well as for military purposes...
(Micral CZ) and Intel 8088
Intel 8088
The Intel 8088 microprocessor was a variant of the Intel 8086 and was introduced on July 1, 1979. It had an 8-bit external data bus instead of the 16-bit bus of the 8086. The 16-bit registers and the one megabyte address range were unchanged, however...
as microprocessors. The Micral M was a multiprocessor. The original SYSMIC operating system was renamed Prologue in 1978. Interestingly, Prologue was able to perform real-time
Real-time operating system
A real-time operating system is an operating system intended to serve real-time application requests.A key characteristic of a RTOS is the level of its consistency concerning the amount of time it takes to accept and complete an application's task; the variability is jitter...
multitasking
Computer multitasking
In computing, multitasking is a method where multiple tasks, also known as processes, share common processing resources such as a CPU. In the case of a computer with a single CPU, only one task is said to be running at any point in time, meaning that the CPU is actively executing instructions for...
, and was a multi-user
Multi-user
Multi-user is a term that defines an operating system or application software that allows concurrent access by multiple users of a computer. Time-sharing systems are multi-user systems. Most batch processing systems for mainframe computers may also be considered "multi-user", to avoid leaving the...
system. The last Micral designed by François Gernelle was the 9020. In 1981, R2E was bought by Groupe Bull
Groupe Bull
-External links:* * — Friends, co-workers and former employees of Bull and Honeywell* *...
. Starting with the Bull Micral 30, which could use both Prologue and MS-DOS
MS-DOS
MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...
, Groupe Bull transformed the Micral computers into a line of PC compatibles. François Gernelle left Bull in 1983.
Truong's R2E sold about 90,000 units of the Micral that were mostly used in vertical application
Vertical application
A vertical application or vertical market application, is software defined by requirements for a single, or narrowly defined, market. It contrasts with horizontal application....
s such as highway toll booths and process control.
Litigation followed after Truong started claiming that he alone invented the first personal computer. The courts did not judge in favor of Truong, who was declared "the businessman, but not the inventor", giving in 1998 the sole claim as inventor of the first personal computer to Gernelle and the R2E engineering team.
In the mid-1970s, Philippe Kahn
Philippe Kahn
Philippe Kahn is a technology innovator and entrepreneur, who is credited with creating the first camera phone solution sharing pictures instantly on public networks. Kahn's first publicly shared picture is unique in that no other teams making the claim have any pictures. Kahn shot the first camera...
was a programmer for the Micral. Kahn later headed Borland
Borland
Borland Software Corporation is a software company first headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, Cupertino, California and finally Austin, Texas. It is now a Micro Focus subsidiary. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn.-The 1980s:...
which released blockbusters Turbo Pascal
Turbo Pascal
Turbo Pascal is a software development system that includes a compiler and an integrated development environment for the Pascal programming language running on CP/M, CP/M-86, and DOS, developed by Borland under Philippe Kahn's leadership...
and SideKick
SideKick
SideKick was an early Personal Information Manager software application by Borland launched in 1983 under Philippe Kahn's leadership. It was notable for being a Terminate and Stay Resident program, which enabled it to load into memory then return the computer to the DOS command prompt, allowing...
in 1983.
External links
- R2E Micral 1972-1985 Federation of Bull Teams Virtual Museum of French computers
- History of Bull-Micral microcomputers Federation of Bull Teams Virtual Museum of French computers
- Birth of the Modern Personal Computer: Micral N of François Gernelle
- Gernelle and Truong
- A picture of the Front panel of Micral-N
- François Gernelle LA NAISSANCE DU PREMIER MICRO-ORDINATEUR : LE MICRAL N Proceedings of the second symposium on the history of computing (CNAM, Paris, 1990)
- François Gernelle Communication sur les choix architecturaux et technologiques qui ont présidé à la conception du « Micral » Premier micro-ordinateur au monde Proceedings of the fifth symposium on the history of computing (Toulouse, 1998)
- French patent FR2216883 (number INPI: 73 03 553), German patent DE2404886, Dutch Patent NL7401328, Japanese patent JP50117333 (inventor François Gernelle) RECHNER, INSBESONDERE FUER REALZEIT-ANWENDUNG (August 8, 1974)
- French patent FR2216884(number INPI: 7303552), German patent DE2404887, Dutch patent NL7401271, Japanese patent JP50117327 (inventor François Gernelle) KANAL FUER DEN INFORMATIONSAUSTAUSCH ZWISCHEN EINEM RECHNER UND SCHNELLEN PERIPHEREN EINHEITEN (August 8, 1974)
: Data processing system, specially for real-time applications: Channel for exchanging information between a computer and rapid peripheral units (pile-canal)
- MICRAL documentation at bitsavers.org