US $7,800 (8K Version I in 1972) US $11,690 (16K Version II in 1972)
Weight:
50 lbs / 25 kg
CPU:
discrete logic - no CPU chip
Memory:
2K-8K serial shift register (Version I) 4K-16K RAM (Version II)
Display:
7x3.5-inch CRT, 80x12 text
Ports:
System bus
Storage:
Dual cassette drives - 130K each
OS:
CTOS- Cassette Tape Operating System
Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC) was founded in 1968 by John Phillip Ray and Austin "Gus" Roche, two engineers who previously worked for General Dynamics' Dynatronic Division in Florida,
which assisted the U.S. space program's goal of putting a man on the moon.
Computer Terminal Corporation's first product was the Datapoint 3300, released in 1969, a CRT-based computer terminal (referred to as a "glass teletype") designed to
replace the ASR-33 mechanical teletype which was in common use during the 1960's. "The 3300 is 100 times better than the 33", CTC declared. The 3300 was very popular and sold well -
"They just couldn't make them fast enough."
Following a similar theme as the Datapoint 3300 - which was to replace the mechanical ASR-33 teletype machines with a sleek electronic version, CTC intended to replace the standard
IBM 029 mechanical card punch with a new sleek electronic version -
the Datapoint 2200. That's why the 2200 screen is so much wider than it is tall, and displays 12 lines of text, 80 characters wide - it's the same dimensions as a standard
IBM punched card.
They also wanted the 2200 to look and act friendly and familiar, with the same dimensions as the popular
IBM Selectric typewriter used by secretaries everywhere.
The Datapoint 2200 isn't really a PC, or personal computer. First of all, the 2200 was originally marketed as a programmable terminal, capable of emulating other terminals
by loading various terminal emulations from tape - there are two cassette tape drives built into the top of the system for loading and saving programs and data.
Secondly, it was very expensive - $7,800 in 1970 translates to about $50,000 in 2020.
The Datapoint 2200 shown here is actually labeled with Cii Honeywell Bull -
a French computer company that used the Datapoint 2200 as a smart-terminal FEP "front-end processor"
for their mini-computer GE-58 -
Level 61/60,
released in 1974.
Anyway, back in 1969, the prototype Datapoint 2200 was built with many circuit boards, using hundreds of discrete components, rather than just a
few programmable IC chips like today. Actually, there was no alternative, as the single-chip microprocessor didn't yet exist in 1969.
As CTC technical director, Victor Poor approached Intel, which was founded just one year earlier in 1968 with just 100 employees,
to see if Intel could reduce the chip count by combined many of the chips into just a few. CTC was already Intel's biggest customer - up to this point in time,
Intel only sold memory chips, of which every 2200 required dozens.
Texas instruments, a giant chip manufacturer out of Texas with 45,000 employees, also wanted CTC's business, and were also given the opportunity to shrink the chip count.
Actually, years before he was hired-on at CTC, Poor and his associate
Harry Pyle (pdf) had already developed an
instruction set architecture which would come to be used in the 2200 -
but at the time they didn't have the resources to develop it.
Eventually, both Intel and TI created single chip microprocessors for the 2200 - Intel's prototype chip was called the Intel 1201, and TI's chip was called the TMX-1795,
but it took both companies more than a year to accomplish, and both chips were too slow, or barely worked - "too little, too late" - CTC never use either one of them in their 2200.
Interestingly enough, Intel made some minor revisions to their 1201 microprocessor
(pdf document - see page 18),
and in 1972 released it as the Intel 8008 microprocessor, and ultimately sold hundreds of thousands
of them to other customers.
Texas Instruments never improved their
TMX-1795 microprocessor, and it was never produced in volume.
In the mean time, CTC had been manufacturing the 2200 ever since November 1970, with the same hundreds of TTL chips on the motheroard as in the original prototype.
The large circuit board on the lower left comprises the "central processor". This PCB was eventually reduced to just a few chips by Intel and Texas Instruments.
There were eventually two versions of the 2200, although they look the same on the outside. The main circuits were re-designed to make the system faster - the original 2200 has
"serial recirculating memory" comprised of Intel 1405 shift registers for
internal memory data storage. The second version has random access RAM chips,
which operate in parallel, allowing much faster processing than the slower serial memory.
In fact, memory reference operations on Version I which took 520usec to execute, only took 4.8usec on Version II; the execution of most instructions was reduced to less than 1/4 on Version II.
Since this particular Datapoint 2200 is from Europe, it had been rewired for 220VAC power.
The 110VAC USA version only has one red circuit breaker on the right side.
While the Datapoint 2200 seems to have failed as an IBM 029 replacement, it succeeded as an easy-to-use desktop computer,
selling between 50-200 units
a month, for many years. By mid-1973, CTC had sold around 2,500 DP-2200 terminals.
From an interview (pdf) conducted in 2004,
Victor Poor said "The light finally dawned in our heads that we weren't in the business we thought we were (smart terminals), we were building desktop computers."
CTC changed the entire company's name to Datapoint at the end of 1972, and some of the same engineers involved in the Datapoint 2200 project were involved in
developing the first commercial local-area network - ARCnet - which came out in 1977.
In 1973, Datapoint
released Datashare,
which made available the full capability of a single 2200 computer to as many as eight remote users, each on their own terminals. By this time, the 2200 was a complete computer system,
with printers, networking, floppy drives, and hard drive support.
Model
Memory
Price (1972)
Version I
102
2K
$6,040
104
4K
$6,630
106
6K
$7,210
108
8K
$7,800
Version II
114
4K
$7,792
118
8K
$9,094
122
12K
$10,392
126
16K
$11,690
Both founders Austin Roche and J.P. Ray resigned as directors in 1974.
Roche formed a new corporation - Mnemonics Ltd. - which would develop a 2.4MB solid-state removable cartridge, but he died in a car accident the very next year,
in August 1975 at age 46.
J. P. Ray, an avid smoker, went on to invent the first smokeless cigarettes - FAVOR,
as in "Do yourself a favor". Users didn't have to light FAVOR - it was called "the vape" and users were "vaping". Ray died of cancer in on August 13, 1987 at age 52.
