The Interact Home Computer (also called The Interact Family Computer) is a 1978 American home computer made by Interact Electronics Inc of Ann Arbor, Michigan. It sold under the name "Interact Model One Home Computer". The original Interact Model One computer was designed by Rick Barnich and Tim Anderson at 204 E. Washington in Ann Arbor, then moving to the Georgetown Mall on Packard St. in Ann Arbor. Interact Electronics Inc was a privately held company that was funded by Hongiman, Miller, Swartz and Cohn, a law firm out of

Detroit Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at ...

. The President/Founder of Interact Electronics Inc was Ken Lochner, who was one of the original developers of the

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 ...

language based out of

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native ...

. Ken had started Interact Electronics Inc after founding the successful computer

time-sharing In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1 Its emergence ...

company

Cyphernetics Cyphernetics Corporation was a commercial timesharing In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, Th ...

in Ann Arbor, which was purchased by

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in 1975. The Interact Model One Home Computer debuted at the

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Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

in June 1978, at a price of . Only a few thousand Interacts were sold before the company went

bankrupt Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debto ...

in late 1979. Most were sold by the liquidator Protecto Enterprizes of

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, through

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sales. It was also sold at Highland Appliance in the Detroit area, Newman Computer Exchange in Ann Arbor, and

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in the

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, area. The computer didn't with any operating system, but

Microsoft BASIC Microsoft BASIC is the foundation software product of the Microsoft company and evolved into a line of BASIC interpreters and compiler(s) adapted for many different microcomputers. It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first ...

V4.7 or EDU-BASIC (supplied with the computer) could be loaded from tape. Probably the most successful application available for the Interact was a program called "Message Center". With it, a store could program a scrolling message which appeared on a TV screen (such as advertisements, or a welcome message to guests). Although it was mostly a game machine (with games such as Showdown, Blackjack and

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), users could also create their own programs using the BASIC computer language. Customers began hooking up the Interact to control everything from lights in their house, doors, windows, smoke detectors, to a

Chevrolet Corvette The Chevrolet Corvette is a two-door, two-passenger luxury sports car manufactured and marketed by Chevrolet since 1953. With eight design generations, noted sequentially from C1 to C8, the Corvette is noted for its performance and distinctive ...

. Later on the design was sold to a

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company, Lambda Systems, and re-branded as the " Victor Lambda" for the French market.

Technical specifications

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, an ...

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

i8080 The Intel 8080 (''"eighty-eighty"'') is the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. It first appeared in April 1974 and is an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibil ...

, 2.0

MHz The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s−1, meaning that one h ...

* Memory: 8K

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, expandable to 16K RAM; 2K ROM * Keyboard: 53-key chiclet * Display: 17 x 12 text; eight colors, 112 x 78 graphics, four colors * Sound: SN76477 (One voice, four

octave In music, an octave ( la, octavus: eighth) or perfect octave (sometimes called the diapason) is the interval between one musical pitch and another with double its frequency. The octave relationship is a natural phenomenon that has been refer ...

s) * Ports: Television, two

joystick A joystick, sometimes called a flight stick, is an input device consisting of a stick that pivots on a base and reports its angle or direction to the device it is controlling. A joystick, also known as the control column, is the principal cont ...

s * Built-in

cassette recorder A cassette deck is a type of tape recorder, tape machine for playing and recording audio compact cassette, cassettes that does not have a built-in power amplifier or speakers, and serves primarily as a Transport (recording), transport. It can be a ...

(1200 Bps) * PSU: External AC transformer * 1980 price: US$300 ()

References

External links

old-computers.com page for Interact

interactfamilycomputer.com
br /> Home computers Computer-related introductions in 1978 {{Compu-stub