I had many different responsibilities: I taught customer education courses, designed some software, acted as a product manager for specialized OEM versions of the OP-1, etc. It was my first job out of school and a great place to enter the world of business. I've lost touch with nearly everyone I knew then but still have pretty good memories of the architecture and a lot of the software.
The OP-1 was the flagship product. The designation 'OP' was the nickname of the founder and CEO, David Ophir. Don't know what's become of him.
Depending on the configuration it could be anything:
I remember the OP-1/50 and OP-1/70 were the mainstays for a few years and I think the primary difference was the amount of RAM. The case was a huge (by today's standards) with a black front, a white enclosing shell (the shell was painted different colors for some big customers) a detachable keyboard and I think a 12" monochrome monitor. Both units had a card cage that could hold 10 boards. I remember some of them: Display Controller, CPU Board (including an async communications port), ROM Board, RAM Board (I think there were 2 slots for RAM 32KB each), I/O Controller (This was just a DMA board that supported the last four boards) and up to four device controller boards (i.e., floppy, hard disk, tape drive, etc.) There was also something called a "Byte String Controller" later called a "Word Move Controller" that had the sole function of quickly moving data around in RAM (I think there were patents on these boards). This was necessary because the speed of the original Intel 8080 and the 8008 that were used in the original OP-1's were just too slow for word processing. The video controllers were pretty advanced and could be customized to do hard stuff, e.g., we produced a Farsi (Arabic) version of a DEC VT-100 that displayed right-to-left.
The OP-1/R came later and was basically a single-board, diskless version of the original system that was based on the Intel 8085 chip. It ran terminal emulator software out of ROM and was a lower-cost system. The case was the same as the one used for the OP-1.
The OP-1/15 was rolled out just as I was leaving the company but I seem to remember that it was basically a reworked OP-1/R in a sexy case.
There was also a box that acted as a disk drive multiplexor (4-ports). I forget what its official name was but remember that this was the best way to share a (very expensive) hard disk drive pre-ethernet/pre-token ring.
Ontel had some very advanced software for its time. The disk operating system was called OP/M (later renamed MP/M when it went multi-tasking) and it had more bells and whistles than anything available for the 8080 family, including CP/M (which it predated). In fact I remember some internal arguments that we should package and resell OP/M for general use on other hardware but management was adamant that the O/S was our proprietary advantage and would not permit it to be licensed.
We had an 8080 assembler, linker and character-oriented debugger that were all developed in-house. We couldn't use the Intel versions because they wouldn't work under OP/M.
I vividly recall one day when a couple of kids came by to sell us their home made BASIC software. They looked like they were out of high school, wearing jeans and sneakers. They loaded it onto the machine using a big pile of paper tape and it worked. Yes, it was Bill Gates and Paul Allen. We licensed BASIC and FORTRAN from them but I don't think we sold too many licenses. Most customers that wrote code for our boxes used either OP/L or Assembler.
The "killer app" was word processing. As I said above, the hardware was designed with word processing in mind and we had some really great programmers that used every last CPU cycle to make it work. We received several awards and were considered to be a top of the line implementation along with IBM, Wang and others.
Much of the software that was written for Ontel hardware was done by OEM customers (did you work for one)? The company encouraged the private labeling of our boxes. We even ran ads that said something like, "They could all be Ontels" or something like that. Here are some customers I remember:
SACO Systems (Johannesburg, South Africa). Principals: Steve Millard and Martin Ossip. They interfaced a lot of custom devices such as card readers. Their customers were mainly the large South African mining companies. I remember going to the Ellensrand gold mine and being given a tour about 1 km below ground level! Cool trip for a 19-year-old; I still have pictures somewhere.
ODP (later renamed Micro-Z) (Los Angeles): Principal was Chaz Haba who later founded HabaSoft, one of the first vendors of Mac software (HabaDex?). Their big customers were in the hospitality industry. One was Hilton which installed a lot of OP-1's. Also produced software used by Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas addn Atlantic City--an important tie-in because Caesar's owned a significant part of Ontel. I'm not sure how that connection came about. There's a movie with Robert Redford (The Electric Cowboy?) that includes a scene at Caesar's front desk that shows a whole line of OP-1s.
Control Data Corp. (Minneapolis): Liked the Ontel emulation of their CDC-714 terminal so much that they discontinued production of the original and sold the Ontel with their name on it. I remember going through a lot of pain trying to get that CDC gold color to stick onto the cabinets.
Olivetti (Ivrea, Italy): Put their name on the OP-1/R and sold it in Italy with a special terminal emulator--I forget the model number. Liked it so much they bought a piece of Ontel.
Telefunken (Germany): Produced a ruggedized version for sale in Germany (possibly to the military?).
International Digital Electronic Associates (Tehran, Iran): Principals were three Iranian brothers who owned the largest DEC distributorship in Iran. Developed the Farsi version and sold it throughout the mideast, particularly Iran, Bahrain and Kuwait. Boy was Kuwait an interesting trip! There was a public hanging outside the office building where I was debugging code! The whole business fell apart when the Shah left Iran and Khomeini took control.
Volt Delta Resources (NY, NY): Developed software under contract to Cunard Lines for passenger ship reservation terminals. Used the OP-1/15 as a front end to a DEC VAX system.
TigerData (Copenhagen, Denmark): Developed an emulator of a mainframe terminal whose name escapes me.
(The above was written by Bill Harts, not by Mark Riordan.)