The EXL 100 is a computer released in 1984 by the French brand ''Exelvision'', based on the TMS 7020

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circu ...

from

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globall ...

. This was an uncommon design choice (at the time almost all home computers either used 6502 or

Z80 The Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor introduced by Zilog as the startup company's first product. The Z80 was conceived by Federico Faggin in late 1974 and developed by him and his 11 employees starting in early 1975. The first working samples were ...

microprocessors) but justified by the fact that the engineering team behind the machine (Jacques Palpacuer, Victor Zebrouck and Christian Petiot) came from Texas instruments. It was part of the government

Computing for All The Computing for All plan (''Plan Informatique pour Tous - IPT'') was a French government plan to introduce computers to the country's 11 million pupils. A second goal was to support national industry. It followed several introductory computer sci ...

plan and 9000 units were used in schools. The design is unusual compared with similar machines of the time, as it had a separate central processing unit. Two keyboards are available: one with rubber keys and another with a more standard touch. Keyboard and joystick were not connected to the central unit by a cable but by infrared link, and are battery powered. Many extensions were available:

modem A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by Modulation#Digital modulati ...

, floppy disk drive and a 16 KB

CMOS Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss", ) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSFE ...

RAM powered by an integrated

lithium battery Lithium battery may refer to: * Lithium metal battery, a non-rechargeable battery with lithium as an anode ** Rechargeable lithium metal battery, a rechargeable counterpart to the lithium metal battery * Lithium-ion battery, a rechargeable batte ...

. Its TMS 5220 sound processor was capable of French

speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...

, another unusual feature. The machine came with a

BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...

version on cartridge named ExelBasic.

Specifications

*Release price: 3,190

French Francs The franc (, ; sign: F or Fr), also commonly distinguished as the (FF), was a currency of France. Between 1360 and 1641, it was the name of coins worth 1 livre tournois and it remained in common parlance as a term for this amount of money. It w ...

* CPU: TMS 7020 at 4.9 Mhz * Graphics chip:

TMS 3556 This is a list of microprocessors. Altera * Nios 16-bit ( soft processor) * Nios II 32-bit ( soft processor) AMD * List of AMD K5 processors * List of AMD Athlon processors * List of AMD Athlon 64 processors * List of AMD Athlon XP processors ...

(40 x 25 character text mode, 320 x 250 pixel graphics mode, 8 colors) * Sound: TMS 5220 (with

in French) * Storage: cartridge port, cassettes, optional floppy disk drive * Memory: 34KB RAM (2KB RAM + 32KB Shared VRAM), 4 to 32KB ROM *Variants: A version with an integrated V23 modem named Exeltel was released in 1986

References

Lists of computer hardware Computer companies of France {{microcompu-stub