Compis

Compis (Swedish name), Scandis (Norwegian name) was a computer system designed and sold to schools beginning 1984. Since it was intended for educational use, it received the name Compis, which is short for COMPuter In School. The name can also be interpreted as a pun on the Scandinavian word kompis, meaning friend or pal. The development was started by Svenska Datorer in 1982 and was overtaken by TeleNova when the former went bankrupt. The computer was distributed by Esselte and mostly marketed towards, and sold to, Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish gymnasium-level schools.

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.

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 Scandis computers, where 10-20 machines shared one hard disk of typically 10MB capacity.

See also

• Education in Sweden

External links

• Compis Info - A site dedicated to the Compis
• Telenova Compis - some documentation available here (page in Swedish).