The most popular Hungarian minicomputer: Videoton R-10 (catalogue)

Description (English)

Leaflet for the R10 computer, showing integrated circuits

The Hungarian industry adopted the French MITRA-15 compact computer, and also based the the R-10 on a French licence. The development of the MITRA-15 had been followed closely by the Computer Science Coordination Institute from its very beginning in 1971, and whenever they travelled to France in subsequent years. Mass production of the R-10 (which was spread countrywide) started in the mid-1970s. Building up the R-10 as an on-line data-collecting system was very beneficial. The peripheral low-capacity was set to (Min. 4, max. 32 kilowords of 16-bit words) minicomputer of TTL circuits with display terminals, punch-card and pinched-tape units plus an 800 kilobyte SAGEM fixed disk and later even an 8“ floppy drive. It was a 16-bit machine, with a ROM-memory of 8 kilobytes. The R-10 (which was produced till the early 1980s) was introduced with great success in the Soviet Union and other COMECON-countries, as well. Being a small and (at that time) relatively cheap computer it functioned splendidly as a ’satellite‘ machine for the bigger machines of the Unitary Computer System. This machine made up a significant proportion of the over one thousand computers used in Hungary by the early 1980s.