Essex Computers, 8073 board, anybody know more ?
 

I found this price list in my shed. I think it was from when the company I worked for was using Forth, so I probably never looked properly at this before.

Now I notice that their Tiny Basic machine is based on 8073, and seems to have an assembler and compiler option.

Does anybody know more about this system ?

Re: Essex Computers, 8073 board, anybody know more ?
 

Tiny computers were based outside Horsham in the mid-80s, good value basic 286 towers. I had 2 of these for running my rentals, worked well. Bob.

Re: Essex Computers, 8073 board, anybody know more ?
 

I don't think that's the same Tiny.

Tiny Computers was a company, Tiny BASIC is a language.

Re: Essex Computers, 8073 board, anybody know more ?
 

Well from the address, I wonder if these were actually designed & sold by the University itself? As I don't think there were too many technology companies spun-out of universities and located on university sites / 'Science Parks' back then. Although my Uni (Imperial College, London) did have some joint ventures with Computing dept and industry doing parallel processing / transputer research. And their Elec. Eng dept had designed and produced their own 6800 computer systems for in-house training purposes.
Also, the OU had various 'Hextor' ones, complete with TV RF-Modulator Output etc. that their students got with various courses (I went to a special event at Bletchley Park's TNMoC a few years ago, to mark 50yrs of the OU and talks by those involved at trying to get computers adopted in the early days, plus the opening of an exhibition room of all the OU computers etc)

Although, I'd never come across the products mentioned in this Essex Electronics Centre advert.

It's interesting that the advert mentions the 'Essex Bus' and there was a 6502 Double Eurocard Controller, that was compatible with this.
- I wonder what connectors were used / what the pinout of this was.

Re: Essex Computers, 8073 board, anybody know more ?
 

This was a mention of this module in a post in 2011, but no info.
https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/...63&postcount=4

There's some info out there on the Essex Electronics Centre and their computing products.

• Peter Mutton headed up the computing division and was (in charge of?) developing the Tiny Basic Module - see 1st photo for an extract of his LinkedIn profile
• An on-line CV for Steve Garratt states:

Who knows, perhaps Peter or Steve are somewhere on this Forum??

• 2nd photo is a description of the module from Electronics and Wireless World Jan 85
• 3rd photo shows the module from an advert in Wireless World Nov 1983
• And here's a description of a real application in a 1984 paper from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.

HERRING MACKEREL AND SPRAT TARGET STRENGTH EXPERIMENTS WITH BEHAVIOURAL OBSERVATIONS
The methods by which environmental data were collected and the pan and tilt controlled were modified. Two Essex Tiny Basic micro computers, one on the raft, the other on the shore were connected together by an underwater cable and interfaced to the Computer Automation mini computer logging the acoustic data (Copland, 1984). The micro computers collected data from the following sensors temperature; conductivity; depth; light level; the angles relative to the horizontal plane of the stereo camera frame (heel and pitch). They also controlled the pan and tilt unit and commanded the cameras and associated flash guns. These modifications enabled the environmental data to be logged on tbe same magnetic tape as the acoustic data, thus simplifying and speeding up analysis.

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