ICL Plc’s PCTV is a personal computer and television combined in one unit because research showed that home computers are not used all the time. It is aimed at the family market where a computer is used only occasionally, and the combination with a television is an incentive to justify investment in a computer at all. Ease of use is another feature ICL believes is important. The PCTV is claimed to be as easy to use as a standard television set. It features 14 Super VGA monitor with resolution up to 1,024 by 768 and double speed CD-ROM. It is based on an 80486DX2 and runs at 66MHz. It has 4Mb of memory and 350Mb hard drive. It comes with MS-DOS 6.2, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Microsoft Works 3.0 pre-installed. It also comes with 5 speakers and a sound system developed jointly with Philips Electronics NV using the Acoustic Horn technology. The PCTV can switch between analogue and digital picture display to show both television and computer images. It is being marketed in mainly in Europe – the UK and Germany, with France to follow at the end of the year. An NTSC version will become available as the market develops. Built into the PCTV is the Den graphical user interface developed by ICL specifically for PCTV and to be used exclusively by ICL. It is designed to be an intuitive means to operate a computer for the novice user and consists of an image of a Den. In the Den is everything you could expect in a family leisure room, such as a television, sound system, computer and games cupboard. The user moves the cursor and clicks on the sound system to play compact disks or on the games cupboard to load and play a game. The Den software is learning-based. It tracks what you have and have not done already on the system so it can lead you through new tasks in a step-by-step manner and lets you alone if you have performed a particular function several times. The games cupboard is able to boot the computer to configure optimally each game that is played. It does this by keeping a record of the configuration required for each new game loaded. The PCTV is expected to cost ú1,500, although ICL is reserving the right to change the price before it is available at the end of this month. It is working on different options and a Pentium version could be one of those, although it feels that the 80486-based system is powerful enough for the home user market it has identified.
