Wicat Advert - July 1982

WICAT had been founded in 1980 as a division of the World Institute for Computer-Assisted Teaching, and concentrated on multi-user systems for educational institutions^[1].

The multi-user Wicat System 150, sold here via reseller Informex of London as the "Informex Wicat", was particularly high-spec for the time, featuring as it did Motorola's 16/32-bit 68000 processor. Wicat had been one of the first to use the 68000 in its System 100 back in 1980.

It also comes with a 10MB hard disk, five RS-232 serial connections for distributed terminals, and 256K of memory, with up to 1.5MB supported.

The Wicat also supported Unix, which although well-established in academic circles had yet to break into the mainstream. It also supported CP/M - unusually via emulation rather than natively.

There's also support for an extensive array of languages, including C - a language which evolved from the also-imaginitively-named B - and which would be considered far more technical than other languages of the day, especially BASIC.

C - developed by Dennis Ritchie - had been around since the early 1970s and was initially used to re-write the Unix kernel. As such its popularity was somewhat tied to that of Unix, so in the same way as Unix didn't become well-known until the 80s, neither did C.

Although it remains a popular language, especially if its relative C++ is included, it's not for the faint-hearted.