🇫🇷 Thomson TO7/70: Part 1 (First look)
25Let's have a look at the Thomson TO7/70 ordinateur français, an upgrade on their original TO7 (or tele/ordinateur) machine with 64Kbytes of RAM (up from 24KBytes), expandable to 128KBytes. There's a few versions of the machine: apparently an original with a membrane keyboard, a 2nd version with the rubber keyboard (like mine) and a 3rd version with a mechanical keyboard (as shown on my machine's box art ... interesting).
As with most other Thomson machines it runs on the Motorla 6809, the same as the TRS-80 CoCo, Dragon Data and SuperPET.
Unlike the MO5, the TO7 doesn't have BASIC built-in and requires it on a cartridge. Interestingly it does have a built-in light pen (or crayon optique) - the MO5 has a port to connect one.
The TO7's internal power supply also appears to offer 13VDC (unregulated it seems) via a 2.1mm DC socket ... so possibly to power the cassette recorder.
Like the MO5, it can load software from cassette but requires a custom cassette recorder (similar to the Commodore 8-bit machines) that decode the audio signal and sends a TTL bitstream to the computer.
Unfortunately it looks like my machine has a faulty the keyboard membrane - the top-left keys ... [1] to [6], [STOP] and [CNT] ... don't give any response. Most other keys beep when pressed. This means that I can't actually do anything as the numeric keys are required to select a cartridge or the light pen, for example.
I did give the membrane a quick clean with isopropyl alcohol (IPA) but no improvement.
So some further work required:
http://dcmoto.free.fr/bricolage/clavier-to770/index.html