TRIUMPH ADLER TA-1100

Little information about this business computer which was first shown at the 1981 Hannover Show (CEBIT).

The TA-1100 belonged to a large family of business systems that comprised the TA-1500, 1600 and 1900 series. The system fitted in a desk and featured a dual floppy drive unit , an A3 - 180 CPS dot matrix printer, and a monochrome monitor. The TA-1100 ran several specific management programs (accounting, payroll, billing...) provided by Triumph Adler. The pictured version is a TA-1100C which was delivered with a different range of software.

Nowadays, it's difficult to beleive that numerous small and medium-sized companies carried out all their daily management operations with only 32 KB of RAM and two floppy drives.

thanks to Marcos Quesada for information and pictures.

Interesting information from Ron Powell:
I worked for Triumph Adler in Sydney, Australia on the TA 1000 series as a tech, and later a programmer.

The TA 1100 you have was one of the later models. The first model was a TA 1000. This was released in about 1975 ? and I attended a training course in Nuremberg, Germany for six weeks. The course was in German !!! with some rough translation done by an Italian so most of my knowledge was picked up by tinkering and reading logic and circuit diagrams.

The TA 1000 was built before floppy disks were in production even though we tried some prototypes. The first model was equiped with data cassettes (same size as audio cassettes). All machines had three cassette drives. We developed commercial applications - billing (invoicing where I come from), payroll etc. We had to design & develop all applications from scratch because anything else was in German. The proceedure was to do data entry and capture the transaction details on cassette. This cassette was then sorted into account number order using a three tape sort. Next the customer masterfile cassette was read together with the sorted transaction cassette, the invoices printed and a new masterfile written to the third cassette with updated balance details etc. Of course there were occasional read errors during this process so we had to write some pretty complex code at a low level to get around this problem.

The programming language was pretty much identical to IBM 360/370 assembler (e.g. MVC A,B,L = move L characters from B to A - or was it from A to B ?) which meant that only one typo would cause catastrophic results and probably send the system into an endless loop.

The TA1100 was then released with those magnificent and totally unreliable 8 inch floppy disks. A hard disk appeared at some stage which was a petty because most of our three tape software had to be redesigned and rewritten. A macro assembler and COBOL complier were also released for the TA1000 series which made life a little easier.

There was also a model released (can't remember the number) with a magnet ledger card reader. There were still a lot of companies using ledger machines and this unit recorded data on a one inch magnetic stripe on the side of the ledger card.