Visiotek AMC-100

There was a Finnish company called Auditek in 1980s and 1990s making “teaching studios” called Visiotek AMC-100 where the teacher could control and monitor the students working on e.g. language classes, the workstations being networked, and with headphones and mikes.

There’s unfortunately awfully little English material I can find about it, but there’s demo/sales video from 1985 narrated in English

IIRC the company moved on with the technology, as the PC technology changed, from CP/M, to x86 generations.

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Not computing, but 10 years earlier the secondary school I went to had a “language lab” where every pupils’s desk had a tape recorder/player and headphones - the teacher could control it all from the master desk and pupils did the whole listen and repeat thing…

I can see how that might be quite expensive, but was moving to computers (CP/M in the early days?) cheaper? I’m sort of suspecting maybe not really…

Good ideas though.

-Gordon

Nice find!

(Just to note, if you put a YouTube link on a line by itself, you get a preview image.)

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Found a couple of references in this paper (see also this related 12 page presentation)

The most popular computers used in high schools during these years were ABC80, Apple II, Nokia MikroMikko, and AMC-100, which the National Board of Education recommended. The machines usually operated with 32–128 kB memory and the most common operating system was CP/M, provided by Digital Research. Furthermore, the most typical computer system was AMC-100, manufactured by Finnish Auditek. One AMC-100 classroom system consisted of one minicomputer for the teacher, six terminals for pupils, educational software, and associated peripherals, which constituted extremely expensive investments for high schools

But we’d need a scan of this magazine:

Or perhaps a look at this government report on ATLAS (a project on computers and software in highschools.)

Edit: from the presentation linked above:

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Thus edited, thanks!

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