12.9

//Source(s): Sources: I own one, plus its manuals. Also, the original review (cover feature) on the OPD in// Personal Computer World, circa 1984; discussions on alt.folklore.computing with people who own or remember them (including one person who worked next to the guy who was ICL's *only* telephone support dude for the One Per Desk); and a BBS in the UK that specializes in Sinclair QL's but has an OPD corner. Is it a computer? Is it a telephone? Is it a tape recorder? No, it's the ICL One Per Desk (aka the ComputerPhone). The IBM personal computer was slow to take off in the UK, where the personal computing scene lagged about 24 months behind the US for most of the eighties. Moreover, the Apple II never gained a dominant share of the market. Thus, many weird and eldritch designs for personal and business computers thrived before the dead hand of standardization clamped down in 1985-1986. The British computing scene was dominated at the time by Clive Sinclair,whose ZX series of 8-bit home micros had out-sold everything else on the market. In 1981, Sinclair began work on a new system, the QL or "Quantum Leap." Equipped with a cut-down Motorola 68000 (actually a 68008) and microdrives (Sinclair's miniature tape storage units, similar in design to a scaled-down 8-track audio tape), the Sinclair Quantum Leap was intended to be both a home and a business computer, and to take Sinclair into the world of 16-bit computing. ICL, a large British mainframe company, wanted to gain a toehold in the business computing market. However, they had no experience of designing, building, or marketing personal computers. While the other business computer makers (such as Apricot) were working on (non- IBM-compatible) MS-DOS machines, ICL decided to build an incompatible version of the Sinclair Quantum Leap. The ICL One Per Desk surfaced in 1984, and sank again around 1987, having sold a few thousand units. It was marketed in Australia by the telephone company as the 'ComputerPhone' and met with a resounding lack of interest. Indeed, the ICL One Per Desk probably ranks as the vermiform appendix of business computing == less useful by far than an IBM PC-jr or an Apple 3. A One Per Desk is essentially a Sinclair Quantum Leap at heart == it boasts the same 68008 processor and operating system. However, its microdrives have been ruggedized and tuned for improved reliability by ICL's engineers (who, in the process, adopted a new format which renders them wholly incompatible with the Sinclair version). It has an incompatible expansion bus and can load software in the form of plug-in ROM cartridges and microdrive (tape-loop) cartridges. It has a single serial port == unidirectional, for sending data to a line printer. Thus, it is totally impossible to get data onto or off of a One Per Desk (other than via the modem). The main application suite bundled with the OPD was a version of the Psion Xchange integrated package supplied with the Sinclair Quantum Leap. However, the One Per Desk couldn't run ordinary Sinclair QL software; ICL had made just enough changes to the system to render it incompatible with its parent architecture, and supplied an inadequate cut-down BASIC interpreter. However, the most interesting aspect of the One Per Desk is its telephony integration. Marketed in 1984, shortly after the privatization of British Telecom, the OPD was one of the first machines designed to plug into the newly demonopolized UK phone network, and the first computer sold in the UK with an integral modem. At that time, the transition to a free market was incomplete; for example, it was not legal to sell telephone answering machines in competition with BT (who leased them for a hefty profit). Thus, the One Per Desk's telephony capabilities were curiously limited. The OPD came with an internal modem (300 baud and 1200/75 baud) and telephone handset, and could plug into two lines, acting as a sophisticated featurephone. Up to twenty pre-recorded announcements could be stored, and it could collect call logging and duration information == but although it could play a message in response to incoming calls, it couldn't record or store voice mail. The One Per Desk was also capable of connecting to Prestel (British Telecom's videotex service) and of acting as a terminal for ICL's mainframes, thus making it a handy peripheral for those centralized computing services. One Per Desks were also capable of calling each other and exchanging documents as 'electronic faxes' via direct modem connections, but had no built-in LAN connectivity options. Towards the end, One Per Desks were marketed with more memory and 'real' floppy disk drives == but as the Sinclair Quantum Leap failed to gain a following as anything other than a games machine, and the ICL One Per Desk was crippled by total incompatibility with anything else on the planet, it never really went anywhere. The point of the One Per Desk as a study in dead media is that it showed a tantalizing glimpse of the way personal computing *might* have evolved. For a machine released in 1984 to have integral messaging and modem capabilities was pretty radical. The idea of the One Per Desk == to be a centralized desktop information resource, with total access to online services, mainframes, and other One Per Desks -- is one that is slowly being realized today by PC's with built-in modems and internet connectivity. Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/
 * Dead medium: ">The ICL One Per Desk**
 * From: charles@fma.com (Charlie Stross)**