Welcome back to part 12 of my SepTandy Spectacular 3. In the last post we ended our look at Tandy 100 clones by taking a look at the rest of The Laser Portable Computers. In this post we're moving from Tandy 100 clones to an MC-10 clone with the Matra Alice.
Released in 1983, The Matra Alice was a licensed clone of the Tandy MC-10 designed for the French market. But much like the machine it cloned, due to its limitations and competition, it became a commercial failure and was discontinued shortly after.
The story of the Matra Alice begins with the company that made it, a company called Matra, they were founded in 1945, and initially began manufacturing airplanes, With Matra being short for Mécanique Aviation Traction. In the 1960s, they began to diversify by getting into the automotive business after purchasing the Automobiles René Bonnet company in 1963, and in 1967 they produced their first in house designed car the Matra 530. They also became successful in motorsport racing, with their cars wining in the Le Mans 24 hour race three years in succession from 1972 to 1974.
By the 1980s, Matra became a conglomerate working in media, weaponry, aeronautics, music distribution, and various other state of the art technologies. In 1981, Matra ventured into media activities via the purchase of the Hachette publishing company. Around the same time, they saw the personal computer business expanding more and more In both the US and Europe. Seeing an opportunity, they started a partnership with the American Tandy in order to manufacture computers in France and in 1983, Matra and Tandy agreed on the development of an MC-10 clone: The Alice.
The machine has the exact same layout as the MC-10. On the front of the machine is the model badge and the chiclet keyboard. The only difference between The Alice and MC-10 is the Alice's housing is bright red and the keyboard uses an AZERTY layout rather than QWERTY.
On the right side, lies the all important power switch and nothing else.
On the back, there is the AC adapter port, a SCART output for TVs, an expansion port, a reset button, an RS232 serial port, and a cassette port.
The bottom is where things start differ, there are tiny holes for the speaker, the model information stickers, but no channel selector switch, due to the fact the machine outputs SCART.
Powering on the Matra Alice, You're greeted with a familiar looking BASIC prompt. The Matra Alice version of BASIC is exactly the same as Micro Color BASIC for the MC-10, Which itself is essentially a cut down version of the CoCo's Color BASIC, and is partly compatible. So software written in BASIC can run on both machines with some modification.
Storage wise, the cassette port that is, as you would expect, compatible with the MC-10. However, much like the MC-10, there's no floppy drive support. Although that wasn't much of a problem for the computer's target audience, its still somewhat unfortunate. Of course Matra provided an official cassette recorder for the Alice with a matching red color scheme.
However, Unlike the MC-10, their were more other peripherals available (or at least advertised) besides the 16K RAM expansion, including a Joystick adapter and a modem, although I don't know if these were ever released.
For hardware, the Alice uses the exact same hardware as the MC-10. It uses a Motorola 6803 clocked at 0.89 MHz, 4K of RAM which is expandable to 20K (with 3142 bytes left for user), and 8K of ROM. For graphics, the Alice contains the Motorola MCC6847 Video Display Generator (the same video chip used in the CoCo), with most of the same graphics and text resolutions. For sound, the Alice uses a beeper speaker instead of the 6-bit DAC, outputting various pitches and durations, similar to the beeper speakers used in the Apple II and the IBM PC.
The Matra Alice motherboard
Software wise, much like the MC-10, there wasn't much prewritten software available to purchase,only around 50 games were written for the Alice, and probably less than that for other applications.
You also have the manual and demo tape included in the box, containing sample programs and games. One notable fact is that since Matra owned the Hachette publishing company, they were able to use their expertise to write the instruction manual and software with some beautiful illustrations by Jean Giraud (AKA Mœbius).
The Matra Alice's stylish manual
So how did the Alice do in the market? Not very well! The Alice was marketed as a Sinclair ZX-81 challenger, Just like the MC-10 was, but by the time the Alice came out when the ZX-81 was already replaced by the much more capable Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Not only that but other machines like the TI-99/4A, the Atari 400 & 800, the Dragon 32, the Thomson TO7, the Oric 1, the C64, and the Hector HRX among others. So needless to say, the Alice wasn’t a huge success.
Left to right: The TI-99/4A, the Atari 400 & 800, the Dragon 32, the Thomson TO7, the Oric 1, the C64, and the Hector HRX
But that didn't stop Matra from making new models. Just 1 year later, in 1984, Matra launched the Alice 32. It looked pretty much the same as the original Alice, only it used completely new hardware and had many upgrades including a Thomson EF9345 video chip for higher res graphics, more RAM and ROM, and a faster CPU, all coming in a case containing the computer, the cassette recorder, manuals and software.
The Matra Alice 32
A year later, in 1985, Matra launched the Alice 90, which had 32K of RAM and a full travel keyboard. Both the 32 and the 90 did little and also received lukewarm receptions.
The Matra Alice 90
Matra made one last attempt to get their foot in the market by being part of the country's Plan Informatique pour Tous ("Information technology for everyone") programme, which was designed to get computers into French schools with a machine called the Alice 8000, but Thomson won the whole deal before they could and they canceled the 8000 as a result while still in the prototype stage.
The Matra Alice 8000
Matra exited the computer business shortly after soon focusing on its other businesses. In 1994, Matra became a subsidiary of the Lagardère Group and in February 1999, Matra Hautes Technologies (MHT), which represented the conglomerate's aerospace, defence and telecommunications arm, was merged with the French aerospace corporation Aérospatiale to form Aérospatiale-Matra (now Airbus). With privatization, bleeding through the Lagardère Group, sell-off of its profitable enterprises, and failure of its automotive division caught up and Matra went bankrupt in 2003.
However that isnt the end of the Alice, as it has gained a small, but dedicated fanbase, and has become quite a collectors item for its manual illustrations.
So how do I rate the Matra Alice on compatibility? The Matra Alice ranks as Fully Compatible due to being a rebranded MC-10 modified to work in French Territories. The later models on the other hand may be a bit more problematic but I believe may still be compatible with older software
This concludes Part 12 of my third Septandy Spectacular, join me next time as we take a unique card for the PCs that can give them some features of the Tandy 1000.
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