Exelvision EXL 100 and Exeltel

Summary

The EXL 100 is a French home computer from 1984. It was developed by Exelvision, a company of former Texas Instruments engineers, among them Jacques Palpacuer, Victor Zebrouck and Christian Petiot. Accordingly, it contains a lot of Texas Instruments technology: instead of the 6502 or Z80 processors common at the time, it uses a TMS 7020 at 4.9 MHz; graphics come from the TMS 3556 with 40 × 25 characters of text and 320 × 250 pixels in eight colours, and the TMS 5220 speech chip lets the computer speak French. The EXL 100 has 34 KB RAM.

Its design is unusual: the central unit stands on its own, while the keyboard and joysticks are wireless, battery-powered and transmit their signals by infrared. There is no operating system as such; the ExelBasic programming language comes on a cartridge. The computer cost 3,190 francs at launch. Under the French government’s “Computing for All” plan, around 9,000 units went to French schools.

The Exeltel followed in 1986 with a built-in V23 modem. The unit in the collection is a Spanish version distributed by Amper.