![]() Somewhat ahead of its peers, the Sorcerer included lower case characters as a standard feature. The keyboard included a custom "Graphics" key, which allowed easy entry of the extended character set, without having to overload the Control key, the more common solution on other machines. Unlike those machines, the Sorcerer's keyboard was a high quality unit with full "throw". The machine included the Zilog Z80 and various bus features needed to run the CP/M operating system, but placed them inside a "closed" box with a built-in keyboard similar to machines like the Commodore PET, the Commodore 64, and the Atari 8-bit family. The Sorcerer was a combination of parts from a standard S-100 bus machine, combined with their custom display circuitry. They made minor updates and re-released it as the "Dynasty smart-ALEC". ![]() In 1979 the company sold the rights to the design to Dynasty Computer Corp. However, the machine never sold well in the US, likely due to the introduction of newer machines like the Atari 800 that offered many more features (including color graphics and sound) and directly supported television sets for output, reducing overall system costs.Įxidy tired of the effort quickly. Shipments did not start until later that summer. The expansion systems and drives were released at the same time. The Sorcerer was first launched in April 1978 at the PERCOMP convention in Long Beach, California at a price of US$895. For larger systems, the base unit could be attached to an external S-100 expansion chassis that sat behind the console, allowing cards to expand the system as well as offering floppy disk support. In this form it could be attached to a 3rd party computer monitor and used with software loaded from the "ROM-PAC" cartridges and a cassette tape drive as a low-cost offering. In its basic form it consisted of a single chassis containing the computing hardware with the keyboard on top, a layout that became common with machines like the Atari 800 and Commodore VIC-20. It was powered by a Zilog Z80 running at 2.106 MHz with 4 to 48 kilobytes of RAM, giving it performance parity with the TRS-80. His dream machine would combine these features. The Apple II offered both graphics and color, but required at least some user assembling to get operational. At the time, the PET and TRS-80 offered the out-of-the-box experience he felt was necessary, but these lacked the graphics he felt would be needed, and required the use of a computer monitor which drove up the price. "Pete" Kauffman and Howell Ivy, that a truly simple computer with reasonable performance still wasn't available. He eventually convinced the founders of Exidy, H.R. Having recently sold his share of the seminal personal computer stores, the Byte Shop, Paul Terrell started looking for new ventures. Exidy eventually pulled it from the market in 1980, and today they are a coveted collector's item. It was comparatively advanced when released, especially when compared to the contemporary more commercially oriented Commodore PET and TRS-80, but due to a number of problems including a lack of marketing, the machine remained relatively unknown. The Sorcerer was one of the early home computer systems, released in 1978 by the videogame company, Exidy.
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