Compis

An example Compis system, showing two 5.25-inch floppy disk drives, keyboard, monitor and external hard disk drive
Also known as	Scandis (Norway, Denmark and Finland)
Manufacturer	Svenska Datorer, TeleNova
Release date	1984
Discontinued	1988
Operating system	CP/M-86, MS-DOS
CPU	Intel 80186

Compis (COMPuter I Skolan) was a computer system intended for the general educational system in Sweden and sold to Swedish schools beginning in 1984 through the distributor Esselte Studium, who also was responsible for the software packages.

The computers were also used in Danish, Finnish and Norwegian schools under the name Scandis.

History

In 1980, the ABC 80 used in the schools was regarded as becoming obsolete, and Styrelsen för teknisk utveckling (board for technical development) was tasked to find a replacement. In 1981, the procurement Tudis (Teknikupphandlingsprojekt Datorn i Skolan) was launched, and while the decision was controversial, Svenska Datorer AB was awarded the contract with development beginning in 1982. After Svenska Datorer went bankrupt, production was transferred to TeliDatorer/Telenova under Televerket (Sweden) The computer was distributed by Esselte and exclusively marketed towards, and sold to, Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish schools, mainly high stage (year 7-9) and gymnasium-level.

The computer was based on the Intel 80186 CPU and with CP/M-86 as the operating system in ROM (although it could also run MS-DOS from disk). The computer had a wide selection of ports, including one for a light pen. The Compis project was criticized from the start, and as the move to IBM PC compatibility came it was left behind and finally cancelled in 1988 although it was in use well into the 1990s.

Applications

Notable applications being run on the Compis in an educational environment was:

• COMAL interpreter
• Turbo Pascal 3.0 compiler, under the name Scandis-Pascal
• WordStar word processor
• Harmony software: word processing, spreadsheet and database. The name was a pun on Lotus Symphony, the dominant productivity software at the time.

Some schools had simple local area networks of Compis/Scandis computers, in which 10–20 machines shared one hard disk with a typical capacity of 10MB.