Three cures for amnesia: The new Oric Atmos 48K Billed as a new computer when it was launched at the Which Computer? Show at the NEC in Birmingham between the 17th and 20th January 1984[source: "Oric 2 makes its debut", POCW, 12th January 1984, p. 5], the Atmos was in reality just an update of the original Oric 1 in a new case with an improved keyboard, an updated ROM - which removed most, but not all, of the previous bugs - and a better manual. Oric's Peter Harding claimed that "all those bugs in the old operating system have been ironed out and cassette loading has been much improved"[source: "New improved Atmos kills 99% of all known Oric bugs dead", Your Computer, January 1984, p. 49]. Harding also hoped to offer buyers of the original Oric the chance to upgrade for about £50 ([[50|1984]] in [[now]]). [picture: oric_peripherals_percw_mar84.jpg|A supplement to this advert showing Oric's printer and floppy disk unit. From PCW, March 1984] Although it had poorer resolution and sound than its competitors - the Commodore 64 and the BBC Micro - it had more available memory than both. Some of the Commodore's 64K was eaten by the system and the BBC only had 32K to start with, a full 20K of which was used as graphics memory in the highest-resolution mode. It was quite a bit cheaper too, coming in at £170 ([[170|1984]]) for the Atmos compared to £400 ([[400|1984]]) for the BBC. Oric was hoping that the Atmos would help build on the 170,000 sales of the original Oric made during 1983/84, a plan which at least worked for a while - in the summer of 1984 it was France's most popular home computer[source: "Computer Fair news", Your Computer, July 1984, p. 35]. The company, did however, have a bit of an issue with a shortage of software to run on its non-standard disk operating system, which was based on Hitachi's 3" system and not the emerging-as-a-new-standard Sony 3½" format. To counter this, Tansoft - its software arm and another reference to the old Tangerine connection - transferred several tape-based programs to disk, including business software like Oric Base and Oric Calc as well as games such as Frog Hop[source: "Oric adds stock", PCN, May 19th 1984, p. 5]. [picture: tansoft_yourcomp_may84.jpg|Tansoft advert, featuring Oric Cad and Oric Calc. From YC, May 1984] At the same time, Prism Microsystems was announced as the primary distributor of Oric's products, which was thought to be good news at it should "ensure healthier sales of the Atmos and [encourage] a better flow of new software". Prism had built up a good reputation for after-sales support to its dealers, which included Sinclair, even though it had suffered a theft of 3,000 Spectrums in the previous year[source: "Spectrums hijacked", Personal Computer News, July 7th 1983, p. 5]) and had lost its exclusive right to distribute Sinclair's products earlier in 1984[source: "Prism move", POCW, 24th May 1984, p. 5]. Along with the new Oric deal, Prism also managed to secure the distribution rights for Enterprise's eponymous new computer, which was expected at the time to launch in the September of 1984[source: "Enterprise move",POCW, 26th July 1984, p. 5]. The news of Prism's Oric deal coincided with an unfortunate increase in the price of the Atmos, which went up nearly £20 to £189.95, a move which it blamed on changes in the dollar exchange rate. As a company spokesman explained "At present Oric is building up stock levels quickly in time for Christmas but the strong dollar makes the price of components high, and we have to raise the price accordingly". Oric also reported record June sales of £2.5 million, of which £1.5 million was from France. Only 30% of this figure, representing around 4,500 units, was thought to be accounted for by the UK"[source: "Oric price increased", POCW, 26th July 1984, p. 5]. [extra: john_tullis_pocw_1983_10_13-m.jpg|John Tullis of Oric, © POCW 13th October 1983|160]Back at the beginning of 1984, shareholders of Edenspring Investments, the property and travel investment group, had approved the purchase of Oric Products International Limited, in a take-over bid which started in November 1983. This gave the new company net assets of £5 million to use on further development of the Oric[source: "Oric clear for takeover", Commodore Computing, February 1984, p. 5] and valued Oric at just over £8 million, with Oric holding an 18% stake in the combined group, increasing to 44.2% in the event that Oric made more than £2 million in pre-tax profits in the two years ending June 1985. The deal paid off Oric's outstanding £1 million debts and provided £750,000 in cash. Oric's chairman John Tullis said of it: ~"Because we are increasing our trade so rapidly, and are going in to a number of new products in 1984 we have to widen our capital base to finance the development - we would not have been able to fund that ourselves. We have new computers and peripherals and we also have products which are not in the computer field, particularly in the area of electronic optics". This was all part of a move to try and shift Oric's output such that computers and peripherals would form no more than 50% of its product base[source: "Oric joins up with Edenspring", POCW, 13th October 1983, p. 5]. By April 1984, Edenspring had completed its internal reorganisation, with John Tullis stepping down as chairman "to devote more time to his other business interests", with his role being taken over by Edenspring's chairman David Duguid. Barry Muncaster, meanwhile, became a joint MD of Edenspring, although he was now also having to share his MD role in Oric with the former's Peter Jones[source: "Oric completes its shake-up", POCW, 19th April 1984, p. 5]. The take-over by Edenspring also meant that an Oric project to build an IBM-compatible micro was put on hold, in favour of the Atmos, at the time known as the Oric 2[source: "Oric 2 gets go-ahead", POCW, 15th December 1983, p. 1]. [extra: ORIC_IQ164_popcw_1984-12-06.jpg|The IQ164, aka Stratos. © POCW, December 1984|400]By the end of the year there were rumours that the company had gone bust. It hadn't yet, but its largest suppliers had become major creditors. These including Jermyn and Hitachi (semiconductors) and Stackpole - debts at the time were thought to be around £3.5 million ([[4|1984]] million in [[now]]). The three suppliers were pursuaded to support Oric for at least another three months over the Christmas period with promises that sales of the Atmos would take off "like a stratocruiser" and that the Stratos - also known as the IQ164[source: "New IQ164 details", POCW, 6th December 1984, p. 5] - would do great things in France, despite Oric having to explain a shortage of cash and declining UK sales. They announced in a canned statement that "the future of Oric deserves our total support, particularly in French, German, Austrian, Swiss and Italian markets" in a tacit admission that the UK market had tanked, or as Bazzer Muncaster put it: ~"We're not very interested in the UK market at now - we don't sell in the UK, while our French market is still very strong. Our new Stratos micro is being launched in France this week [end of January 1985]. If it sells well on the continent, it will be launched here in March". Muncaster and fellow director Paul Johnson were at the time attempting to buy Oric back from Edenspring, following their buy-back of software tentacle Tansoft in the Autumn of 1984. Muncaster reported at the end of January '85 that "There is a long way to go in our discussions, but we are talking to investors with the idea of putting a consortium together". Acknowledging that Oric was in a bit of a state, Muncaster continued "We would like to tighten up Oric quite a bit. The industry is in a sticky position and we have had difficulty retaining our market share"[source: "Oric directors plan buy-out", POCW, 31st January 1985, p. 4, 5]. To add to the fun, whilst this was going on Oric was also threatening former distributor Prism with a £300,000 lawsuit, presumably to get some sort of revenue coming in[source: "Oric's renewed lease of life", Personal Computer World, December 1984, p. 99-100]. By the spring of 1985, Oric was really on the edge, with Bruce Everiss admitting that sales in the company's core French market had collapsed over the previous few months because, as he put it, "the Amstrad is the cult machine in France at the moment". As well as the loss of its important Gallic sales, Oric's machines were by now being sold for £50 or less (about [[50|1985]] in [[now]] money)[source: "Price crash", Your Computer, April 1985, p. 31], whilst the company was also blaming Prism for "failing to distribute properly"[source: "Oric slides", YC, March 1985, p. 20]. After suffering repeated financial crises, the receiver was called in. The rights for all of Oric's future machines, including the Stratos and an as-yet-unnamed Motorola 68000-based machine, as well as all existing (including partially-finished) Atmoses, were eventually sold for "several hundred thousand pounds" to French distributor Eureka Informatique, formerly known as SPID[source: "Oric bought by French company", POCW, 13th June 1985, p. 4]. Eureka planned to continue assembling Atmoses in its newly-purchased factory in Normandy, until the stock of components was exhausted, and sell them in France because, as the company's president Jean-Claude Talar stated, the Oric still "enjoyed a good reputation [there]"[source: "Eureka for Oric - Normans conquer Atmos", Your Computer, July 1985, p.13 ]. It had taken several months to get to this point and there had been several companies in the frame, including the original "hot favourite" of Oric's French distributor ASN. In any event it was expected that whoever eventually bought the remains of Oric would be paying a lot less than the £6 million of debt the company had accrued. [extra: bazzer_muncaster_pocw_1983-09-22-m.jpg|Barry Muncaster - geezer, © POCW, September 1984|160]Barry Muncaster, Oric's founder, had even been part of the ASN-backed £1 million bid to rescue his own company[source: "Acorn deal gives Oric fresh hope", PCN, March 2 1985, p. 2]. He was quoted as saying "You've got to be something of a lunatic talking big money. We founded Oric on £250 and we could do it all over again for £500". Perhaps these were not the best words to fling around in the press when trying to sell a bankrupt company - even the receiver, Dennis Cross, had gone on record as being "perplexed" as to what Muncaster's status was exactly[source: "Paris firms in Oric bids", Personal Computer News, April 27th 1985, p. 2]. Cross had seen Olivetti's bail-out of Acorn at about the same time as Oric's crisis as evidence that "he could get a better offer for Oric", to which end he placed a new "for sale" advert in the Financial Times. Muncaster had also caused a bit of a stir in the autumn of 1983 when he was said to have rocked up at a garage and purchased a £46,500 ([[46500|1983]]) Ferrari on his American Express Gold Card - about the most expensive thing it was possible to actually put on a card, according to Amex[source: "Chip Chat", PCW, October 1983, p. 408]. The lawsuit against Prism never happened, and the distributor of Orics ended up as simply one of several reasons put forward by Oric for its collapse, the others being its advertising agency as well as "the stupidity of British micro buyers" - something of a bridge-burning statement if ever there was one. As Guy Kewney wrote in April 1985's PCW, the sole function of Oric's 6502 machines - since the days of Tangerine - had been "to make other micros look better". He continued ~"it was cheaper than the BBC, but what wasn't? It was better quality than the Spectrum, but everything was. It had more software than the NewBrain, a better disk system that the Commodore 64 (which wasn't hard), a friendlier Basic than Atari, faster graphics than a TRS-80 Model 1 and better sound than an Apple". But perhaps the biggest issue for Oric was that when other companies like Acorn and Sinclair, with its QL, were moving on to 16-bit machines, Oric had just announce a new 8-bit machine, the IQ 164[source: "Surprise, surprise", PCW, April 1985, p. 97-99]. It was said that staff at Oric were surprised at how little fuss was being made of the company's collapse, whereas by the time it happened, most people had "taken it for granted that it would". Before it was sold, it had amassed somewhere between £3 million and £4.5 million of debt and the future of its Tansoft subsidiary, currently in rescue talks with Bruce Everiss, was also in doubt. Everiss, formerly of over-hyped-and-over-funded Imagine Software, was out of Oric - where he acted as marketing consultant - and Tansoft by March 1985[source: "Quit", PCN, March 9 1985, p. 44].