Fujitsu ICL PCTV  

Thanks, what a trip. I had one of these, it came with Wing Commander Privateer, what a gem!

Never realised it was £1500 in 1995 I certainly was a lucky boy to have got one for Christmas 1995 and found a couple of old pics of opening up the tall white box and another actually on it oddly with a TV/VCR on the shelf next to and a few more over the years, do remember the room where you clicked on different objects used to confuse me and was wondering if you was going to show, glad you did and remember that clippy the paper clip used to annoy me always popping up, ending up keeping and using until the early 2000s until it got to slow, thank you for the trip down memory lane, recall the only game I got to go with it was Star Trek The Next Generation, boy I was very excited that Christmas

I have seen every possible way the human hand can gesticulate in this video alone.

0:22 Your face sold the joke perfectly. 😀

I wish the USA Toys R Us had stuff like that back then. Their electronics section mainly catered to consoles and handhelds.

man, I miss the LPX Form Factor that this system uses. Wished it would have been more standardized like LPX, but regardless, its a BEAUTIFUL Format. Especially for smaller Desktop Systems.

Thank you so much for the video.You made me travel back in time. I've had one of these for several years. I was very happy with him. At the time it was a great machine but also very expensive, around €2500 in current currency. After it became obsolete I bought a new one and swapped the fujitsu for an HP 660c inkjet printer. Now I regret having done it. I wish I had it up and running now.

Interesting bit of kit!

Very interesting curiosity. You certainly find some interesting stuff.

I had one of these!! I thought I made it up as no one I know had ever heard of it lol Thanks for the memories :D

Poorly marketed but no less useful addition to some family households - awesome coverage - new sub here. :) EDIT seems to be a kind of competitor/PC version of a Macintosh TV model too. Which was released in 1993.

You can potentially activate the SCART input (even RGB) using the control signals on the SCART socket, I can't remember the exact pins etc but a Google should have your answer but from memory I remember there's a signal to switch to SCART input, and another to select composite and RGB. Newer TVs even looked at the voltage of one of these signals to select 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratio. I think it's as simple as applying either 5V or 12V to one of the pins. There's some good info on the SCART Wikipedia article that explains the signalling better.

As someone who worked for icl fujitsu at the time, I can let you in to a secret. They had no idea how to market anything let alone this thing. As an employee it felt like no body had any idea what they where doing at that point. I did like that the advert included a clip of The Bill.

First off, thanks for putting this video out. I have a nearly identical CD-ROM drive in my spares pile that I thought was dead when I connected it to a standard IDE port on a bog standard controller card. That bit of information has given me hope that I can still use it in a build later on. As for the remote control, some of those universal types have a search feature that sometimes works if you can't seem to get a prescribed code to work. It's the mode that has you sit there in front of the TV and repeatedly press the power button and when it does power off, you hit a certain button to lock that code into the remote control's memory.

Thanks for inviting me to help out on the video, it had been years since I thought about the machine and it was a great trip down memory lane! Its a shame the remote is so hard to track down, I wonder if with enough time and patients you could work it out using one of the usb IR blasters or one on some of the other android phones?

If you have any old VCR recordings, you might be able to scrape some teletext off of them, there were a few archive projects I’ve seen that did that, this machine might have been perfect for that with a bespoke program. Excellent video! Definitely a funny little museum piece now, hope you can find the remote!

Fujitsu uses the ICL brand nowadays for point-of-sale hardware.

had this and it was great to a point

OMGs, I actually had one of these back in the day. I got it from Morgan Computers in Birmingham in 1996 or 1997 (can't remember exactly when), who dealt with mainly remaindered / surplus / end of line and refurbished stock, and paid £300, brand new, so obviously it didn't sell well at the somewhat.... ambitious.... launch price. I never used it as a TV, but squarely as a desktop computer, complete with the weird "study room" front end bloatware. I did put Win95 on it and surprisingly it actually ran pretty much OK with the RAM bumped up to 16mb. The main issue I found with mine (not sure if others encountered this) was that the case had a total lack of ventilation, and sharing the case with the monitor meant there was a *lot* of heat build up. It never got to the point where the system was unstable but it was noticeable whenever you opened it up if it'd just been running. Unfortunately, there was very little you could do with getting into hardware hacks as there was no space or wiring for a fan. On the plus side, it was a very tidy working arrangement, and I found the keyboard / trackball to be a really nice setup. Also the side out tray made getting to the hardware an absolute breeze - completely tool free, provided you didn't loose the key! ;)

i had one of those computers, can remember the den. the fan was a little loud when watching the tv. It had good build quality.

LGR would love this

Honestly a 486DX2-66 was pretty par for the course in '95 considering the target audience for the machine and not to mention the Pentium's bruised reputation at the time.

That’s like the grandfather of the smart tv

Like you, I was expecting at least a Pentium 75 or 100, the cheapskates. Shame about the dependency on the remote control but I did enjoy the lock 'opening' solution 😊. The PC part is almost the same spec as my IBM Valuepoint, even the video chip and VLB slot are the same although the IBM can take a processor upgrade. Hope you find a remote that works. It's not unpleasant to look at.

That commercial is just dripping with 90s aesthetic.

That was such a weird advert haha, oh my god!

I think somewhere around 1997/1998 I've been able to play a bit with one of its successors. The PC part also was outdated back then and it was labelled Siemens (or Fujitsu Siemens). It seemed to me as the TV was essentially a modified mid-range Siemens from that time. I that model had an AV-button. As a portable TV it certainly was outstanding, particularly because of it's high resolution CRT. I wonder if you have tried the obvious thing with the SCART-input on that set and give it the 12 Volts what's usually used to switch TVs to AV.

My dream PC / CRT TV. It even has SCART!!!!

The ram expansion for the video card is using what appears to be ZIP ram, which was used on the Amiga 3000 as well. It shouldn't be proprietary. if you get 2 pieces of 256Kx16 at 60ns you should be good to go. Packard Bell used ZIP ram for earlier 486 motherboards as well.

Not sure if it was brought up but Intel did have overdrive cpus with built-in voltage regulators

Hey CRG, was subscribed to you ages ago then had to start a new Google account and couldn't find you. Finally managed it. I think this fits into the category that CDTV and CD-I occupy. I would go out on a limb and say this was designed by blokes. I doubt any women were consulted on this. If I tried to get my mum of the 1990s or my partner now to agree to "look you can watch TV and go on the computer in the lounge" I would be cut off with "That is not going in the lounge." This ultimately why I think this failed, along with the fact the TV is too small for most lounges.

Blue LIghtning!

I wonder if any of the old Palm or Windows CE remote control apps might have the codes for download, as usually a feature of 'registering' the software was a pile of remote codes pre-installed. Usually far more codes than a typical universal remote would have, and that would be around the same time period. Also, there's few IR things in Linux for either using remotes on a software like MythTV as well as to send/blast out to control TVs that might have codes too.

Try to look for a manual for this pc tv. Perhaps there are pictures in from the remote control. Then you know where to look for.

Oooooooh could that monitor be multi sync ? Hmmm 15 KHz modes on that VGA connector like Acorns used ?

The Overdrive chips have the voltage regulators you need built into the units themselves. You have to be careful though because there are two varieties: one meant for a special Overdrive socket, and one meant to go into a normal socket. There's an extra pin in one of them, but they both have the VRs. As for the Panasonic interface, yes, it's the same number of pins and you can use a 40-pin IDE cable, but I know from experience that it's a proprietary interface and you need a Panasonic port on a controller board for it to work.

Did you ever find a way to switch to the AV input without the remote? I have one of these machines now but no remote control. Weirdly enough sometimes when I've turned it on, it's gone into Scart mode, I actually hooked a console up via scart and it worked perfect, but then if you press the channel buttons it goes back to TV and I then couldn't get back to scart again. I've also done a bit of digging on the software side as much as my current knowledge would take me, and it seems the DOS TSR that gets loaded talks to the VREMOTE.386 driver which listens for IR signals and then sends signals via the I2C protocol to the TV part to switch the channels etc. Someone with enough knowledge of debugging old DOS programs I expect would be able to write a program to control that the same as the VKDPCTV.386 driver does with the few hotkey combinations that you already found. I don't actually need the Scart/AV functions to work, but every now and again it really bugs me that the functionality is there and we can't control it. There is one person I found on the VOGNS forum that claims to have a remote control, I was hoping to contact him to see if we could get the IR codes captured so we could program a universal remote, but my new account won't let me PM anyone.

Maybe try out a ir blaster for the smartphone instead of a remote.

On the benchmarks why did the processor speed not show up correctly? Also I wonder if there was some sort of software upgrade that you could get to enable the composite and SCART connections. I do wonder how closely the TV and the PC monitor side were connected as having to go from a TV resolution to a PC resolution is quite a jump. If you are comfortable with taking the monitor apart further (keeping the high voltage cap connected to the tube if you are concerned about getting shocked) you should be able to get to the PCB where the AV inputs and the main TV control IC is. The part number on the chip may be able to be traced down to a few manufactures of TV's and then you may be able to figure out the code for it. Alternatively you could follow the wires from the IR sensor and see what chip or chips they connect to and see if any of them make sense for being in a TV and if not that is why a universal TV remote will not work with it. Also may be worth backing up the hard drive to some online pace (archive dot org etc) so that this rare software can be preserved.

This likely had similar problems to the Amstrad mega PC I used to have. It was too long in development causing it to be both out of date and too expensive at launch time.

I remember not being able to run any games on it...was jealous of pentium 75 owners...

that commercial was made by the same guy who did the artsy Mr. Plow commercial

Interesting system for sure. But it seems a bit less integrated than you would expect. For instance, it seems like it can only capture RF and not SCART and the like. Something like the later eMachines one does that little thing better but that's a whole different generation. Still, it was a very interesting video and if I do come across it myself I would love to add it to my collection.

I would love one of those puppies :D

Yup i had one of these, the television was pretty decent but the tv's sound in NICAM was very tinny, sounded good in mono though, the pc aspect of this machine was pretty poor though, had the Fujitsu/Siemens MULTITAINER pc as well, that ran win98, i would have replaced the coin cell battery with a 2xAAA battery holder, 2xaaa batteries would last years, the logitech harmony 650 will control this.

Use the SCART, you can remote control it with applying voltage to a pin

Just a off change did you try selection the program down button \/ till it reaches it's end, or up button /\ till it reaches it's end it might select AV at the end.

New to me , never even seen a pic of one before

Some smartphones, like Xiaomi ones do have IR output. It's also sooo cheap to get an IR emitter connected to Arduino/raspberry and develop your own just by testing frequencies. It could be a funny video.

if it's anything like the similar apple PC/TV - multimedia's machines of that time, AV In's and Out's where connected like APPLE/PC VIDEO/capture card, not the tv part directly, it was like digitised, in computer first, they sent to the display like any computer graphic program would do,

Does the unit look for a RF signal that would come from the Fujitsu ICL PCTV Remote.

Do you have a phone with an ir blaster? If so maybe try that?

Cool machine! No wonder it failed in the marketplace though, that spec was basically obsolete when launched - ouch. Given that the L2 cache bandwidth was only around 40MB/sec, the 25MB/sec for the memory seems more than appropriate. The 150 figure you mention must be from a later design, and you misremember it. :)

Now, that’s a big Chromecast! 😇

I had one of these, a long time ago.

Awesome! :D We can read each character of 9x16 pixels (IBM font) at 80-char x 25-line despite CRT "TV" because the monitor needs to have each "micro"-dot of shadow mask (likely) and it "connects" the system PC. TV on monitor is more much focus than the traditional CRT TV. We can't read each character of 8x14 or higher pixels at 80x25 because the traditional CRT TV gets poor focus - it hasn't micro-dot. Try to connect with HDMI to VGA adaptor to Xbox S|X or PS5 to get 1280x720p on your Fujitsu monitor -> we get still the good focus! ;)

So if the screen shows old TV mode and VGA it is a multisync - that much more relativates the price. I know what I paid for a Multisync for my good old Amiga 4000. Actually I would realy like such a PCTV just for that. I do not have the original A4000 case anymore. Putting it inside this PCTV would be extremly nice to use all screenmodes, ECS and AGA.

I want the drugs Fujitsu ICL were on when they made that advert... -Dx

I never saw a combination like that :O

Great video on a very unique PC! Where in the UK do you live?

The Lockpicking Lawyer would be very disappointed that you resorted to a drill.

I remember these machines and at the time I did look at more than one in the stores. I was entranced with the form factor and the idea of a TV and PC all-in-one was very appealing. However, the immediate turn-off to a novice like myself at the time was the keyboard and trackpad design. Not considering the option of replacing those, they were very unappealing. Then, the specification when compared to comparable systems of the day was hugely off-putting, leading me to dismiss the machine as a gimmick. Even with hindsight, I think that was the right conclusion to make. It deserved to fail.

The one thing that ad told me is someone did a ton of drugs.

1 - Video seems to be on isa bus. 2 - Try to enable burst write in bios.

The AV channel; did you try the channel up/down buttons on the front of the machine? Usually once you reached beyond the RF signals it went to the AV signal, right? Often channel 0? Also a lot of universal remotes have ways to switch modes by putting in some code in the remote; it's possible the remote can be switched to a remote encoding the PCTV can read, but you would have to find the manual of the codes for the remote, and some database for a variety of machines that will hopefully include the PCTV that tells you what kind of remotes it can read; you would then have to crossreference and switch the remove; I don't know whether your remote has that functionality and such a manual online anywhere.

I had a similar computer by Siemens-Nixdorf. Initially with a 486DX2/66 and 8MiB RAM, I upgraded it to a DX4/100 and 32MiB. It had a fast ET4000 graphics chip that could even run Quake 1 and GTA 1 decently playable in 320x200. Windows 98 ran well on it. The design was similar so I wonder if these came from ICL, too (or the ICL came from Siemens-Nixdorf?) Fujitsu swallowed SNI after all. Even the way the monitor hooked up to the mainboard was the same on my Siemens unit. Watching more of this, that whole unit looks so similar to the Siemens, but it had PCI. Maybe the Siemens was the successor to this.

Hi! Did you already tried channel up and/or down button in a full round of the channels, that was a usual thing in the past, AV button just a shortcut was.

For once my guess at the cpu was correct.

Did you find any chips regarding the TV side on the boards? Something like Hauppage or maybe WinTV? I think from the persons description of the remote control you are not looking for a standard "consumer IR" but an IRDA remote what with it supporting a keyboard and ball of some description.

What about a LITEON DVD/RW drive and a IDE2SATA adapter to let you use the new LITEON DVD/RW drive.

I think there's a pin in the SCART standard for auto switching... I wonder...

Trying two universal with no success. made me think maybe its the inferred sensor the problem .

Use the scart input for AV? If you send 12V to pin 8, the TV should switch to AV automatically.

Open the back of the TV, remove the ICL logic board and find the chip that controls the inputs. Follow where the composite and SCART signals go to. It'll probably be some sort of analogue switch/multiplexer IC, maybe a 74 series. Download the datasheet to find out which are the control pins and add a switch on the front of the TV to pull the required pins high and/or low.

Imagine if they would also added a VHS player OwO

Cool PC =D I think it was lacking a bit at the time it came out. As you say, most people were rocking 486DX4-100's around then. That said, I think it would have sold better with an Intel 486 and better marketing.

Did you try hitting channel down button when in tv mode

Shame that you cannot replace the motherboard with a DAA78L plus a AMD A10-7800 (Kaveri) plus 64GB of DDR3 RAM

I'm sure you're aware of this, but some of the better generic remote solutions allows you to read all the codes off of an original remote and save them to a file, which then anyone can use to reproduce the remote. I believe the "Superior" USB IR dongle can do this but not sure.

lol imagine trying to sell a PC in 1995 to the masses *without* Windows 95 on it!

Most universal remote controls need to be programmed with the correct ir codes.

Kinda want one.

But does it run Solitaire™©®

You can try a xiaomi phone (i have a redmi 9 power) and this phone has a remote control ir sensor build in, it comes with a remote app, but you can install whatever app you want that can use that ir sensor in the phone, i have a avertv box, that makes a tv from any computer monitor, but i didn't had the remote for it to turn up the brightness, because without that remote, you couldn't see anything, it whas way to dark, now, my avertv box thing is useable again thanks to my xiaomi phone! So maby somebody could make an app or something that talks to the tv? Its just a sugestion :) hope you can get a real remote for it!

I think that is a reskinned Microsoft bob at least that’s what the first screen looked like

£1500 ?!?! Dream On ! I know it was too early for DVD --- but how about VCD ?

Ha haaa, that advert was hilariously bad, reminded me of a Simpsons piss take!

I think someone dipped there toes too far in psychedelic drugs when they did that commercial.

The closest thing to amstrad sega pc

PC manufacturers had a talent for making their "innovations" look awkward and inelegant. Still do.

Logitech Harmony, the only universal control. Those all4one or one4all, whatever, are just crap.

PCTV was overpriced, underpowered and poor value for money priced at £1,500 in 1995 that could in 2021 prices be as much as £3,000. Intel Pentium processor PC's with higher specification could in 1995 be bought for £1,000 or less with a computer monitor with money left over for a TV.

This thing was bloody awful