Tangerine Advert - March 1981

The basis for the Microtan 65 was a 6502-based single-board computer, which as advertised was sold for the bargain price of £80, which is only about £420 in 2025 money.

That's slightly misleading though as the price didn't include the chassis or the case - just the board.

The advert is nicely representative of the "overlap phase" in computing, where kit computers - where everything like video, memory and even a keyboard was an add-on extra - were still being sold, even though more modern fully-built computers had been around for several years - not least the Commodore PET, TRS-80 and Apple II. Even the IBM PC was on the market in the US.

However, there was clearly still a demand for this form factor, and £80 was, regardless of how much soldering had to be done to get it to work, a price only matched by "toy" computers like the Sinclair ZX80.

Tangerine's Tantel Prestel adapter, at £170 + VAT, or around £1,040 in 2025

By late 1981, the company - or rather its Tandata offshoot - had released the Tantel Prestel adapter - which at one point had captured 70% of the Prestel adaptor market^[1].

The Tantel had not been in Tangerine's roadmap, with the company intending to focus on its colour VDU card and modem for the Microtan.

Instead, it was approached by a Prestel insider who suggested that it should build an adapter, instead of its other add-ons.

Johnson knocked up some designs and decided it was a viable suggestion, saying:

"From the day we decided to manufacture the Tantel, it took just seven weeks to produce a circuit diagram and a circuit-board layout, to finalise mechanical engineering aspects, to write the software, and to win Post Office approval. We had already conceived the product and knew roughly the approach we were to take".

Despite the enthusiasm that Tangerine had for producing the Tantel, Johnson was scathing of the Post Office itself and how it went about promoting Prestel. In an interview published in November 1981's Your Computer, Johnson said:

"[The Post Office] spends an absolute fortune on telling people how wonderful Prestel is and how wonderful the Post Office is for having invented it, but the campaign does not actually say 'you need it, go out and buy it'. About £6 million was spent on one promotional campaign not so long ago. What the Post Office must do is increase public awareness of Prestel. Before we entered the scene, the entire industry had spent £48 million and produced 7,000 registrations. Goodness knows what they spent it on. Little old Tangerine has sole 5,000 adapters since then. We are doing more for Prestel than anyone else".

The relative success of the Tantel was such that the company was considering splitting itself into two divisions - one to manufacture Viewdata products, and the other to continue with its computer line.

In the spring of 1982, Tangerine, which had built up something of a cult following, announced plans for its next machine - the Tangerine Tiger, or sometimes Tigress.

With three processors, including a Zilog Z80A CPU, a Motorola 6809 for I/O and a dedicated graphics processor, lots of ports, built-in networking and advanced graphics, including the capability to do polygon shading, Personal Computer World was calling it a "dream machine".

P‌CW's Peter Rodwell's main wish though was that the Tiger came in a suitably stripey case^[2].

Tangerine eventually abandoned the Microtan 65 after about 10,000 systems had been sold.

However in late 1983 it was resurrected by Microtanic Computer Systems, which had acquired all the rights to the system and decided to re-launch it^[3].

The updated Microtan board shipped with a similar (and optional) 19" frame and a power supply and came with the option of several peripherals, including a proper keyboard and a disk unit.

It retailed for £59.95 (£260 in 2025 money) for the basic Microtan, with an optional keyboard costing an additional £79.95 (£350) and a colour VDU board adding on an extra £89.95 (£390).

The 3,000-member-strong Tangerine Users Group (TUG) had also been active in the survival of the Microtan 65, in particular through the efforts of the group's Bob Green.

TUG had even been supplying its own hardware items such as the VDU 80/82 80-column video card, nearly a year before Microtanic's updated efforts, as well as its first serious hardware project - the Programmable Graphics Module^[4].

Bob Green, managing directory of the Tangerine Users' Group. From Your Computer, February 1982

The group, formed in 1980 and turned into a limited company in October of that year, was based in Charminster near Bournemouth in Dorset. It numbered over 1,000 members by the beginning of 1982.

Relations between TUG and Tangerine were sometimes frosty, as Tangerine - possibly not happy about TUG's branching out into its own hardware - had launched its own rival organisation with its own monthly magazine - the Tansoft Gazette.

Bob Green, TUG's managing director, commented on the state of relations between the two in an interview in February 1982's Your Computer, saying:

"We support the system, not the manufacturers"

TUG also accused Tangerine of failing to meet the users' needs, pointing out for example that after two years on the market, the Microtan still had no floppy disk unit.

Tangerine's Paul Kausman admitted that the company had neglected its first born in favour of the Tantel adapter, but claimed:

"The next product [Tangerine is] releasing is a floppy disk package. It will include a Forth language specially adapted and extended for the Microtan".

TUG on its part was looking for new premises to expand its operations, and already had 21 products waiting to be shipped. Wary of saturating its market, it was releasing them slowly at a "controlled rate"^[5].

Tangerine never released the Tiger, although it did get as far as announcing it to the press as the TD-3000 Tigress.

However it had also sold the design to Cambridgeshire-based HH Electronics, which released it in 1983 under the Tiger name. Unfortunately, HH's parent company went bust three months later, with HH itself eventually being sold on to Laney Amplification.

Meanwhile, Tangerine had started work on a smaller microcomputer aimed more at the games and home market and which was designed to take on Sinclair's ZX Spectrum.

Called the Oric-1, Tangerine would create a new company - Oric Products International, set up with funding from British Car Autions^[6] - in order to launch it.