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Syntrex

S

Securix

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 7, 2009
Messages
196
Location
New Joizey, USA
Hi all,

Back in October 2009 I visited Tony, the elderly fellow in NJ who had a whole house filled with vintage stuff. On a previous post, I mentioned he sold me a heap of old machines, one of which was this old Syntrex machine.

Finally got around to cleaning it up and opening it up to see what's inside.

There's not much I can find online about it other than they appear to have been based in NJ, so I'm guessing this probably came from Rutgers as did a lot of stuff Tony had. Syntrex seems to have been in the business of making dedicated word processors, some of which had networking capabilities. There's mention of a Gemini file server and Aquarius terminals, but I don't see any reference to this on the machine itself though it does have a "comm" port. My guess this might be an Aquarius terminal.

It most likely ran a dedicated OS on floppy disks as it has no hard drives in it.

References to Aquarius seem to be in the 1984 timeframe.

It has an 8086 cpu and a card that looks like it might have some static ram and may have been part of the networking interface.

It has round "DIN" style ports for monitor, keyboard and console.

I don't know much else about it, so if anyone has documentation or other historical info, I'd be grateful.

Thanks!

syntrex1.jpg

syntrex2.jpg

syntrex3.jpg
 
Exactly the same as an Olivetti ETS1010

Software is proprietary but based on CP/M-86.

I thought they were all made in Italy, but it turns out some were made in Sarajevo (See page 35).

I probably have disks for this system. This was a big seller for Olivetti.

Here's some ad copy

From the same site:

Acquisite importanti competenze nel campo dei sistemi di scrittura grazie alla collaborazione con la società americana Syntrex e alla commercializzazione in Europa del sistema ETS 1010 sviluppato dalla Syntrex, ma adattato ai mercati europei dalla Olivetti, l’Azienda di Ivrea progetta in proprio un interessante sviluppo dell’ETS 1010.
Click to expand...

So, apparently, the software could have been written by Syntrex, depending on what "collaboration" means.
 
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I worked for Syntrex in 1985/86 on the production floor and later in customer service. The main company was located on Industrial Way West in Eatontown, NJ. There used to be field offices all over the US and one in England, I think. Everything from developement to production was done in house except for peripherals like printers and electronic typewriters. We used Olivetti and Brother. The hard drives were in a separate cabinet about the size of a dishwasher.
 
Looks like a Syntrex Aquarius II

Looks like a Syntrex Aquarius II

I worked for a company that sold Syntrex, 1983-1985, and have a stack of spec sheets. The unit you photographed appears to be an Aquarius II "The Multifunction Workstation" I have scanned the spec sheets & put them into a PDF file. I am not sure how I would share on this forum - if you have suggestions, I am happy to contribute

Aquarius II included an electronic typewriter (which they referred to as a keyboard/printer) attached to a CRT & base with dual disk drive (5 1/4" floppies)

Deb
 
Deb_Campbell said:
I have scanned the spec sheets & put them into a PDF file. I am not sure how I would share on this forum - if you have suggestions, I am happy to contribute.
Click to expand...
The best way seems to be email. The forum limits the size of files when you upload them, and 9 times out of 10, the file is too big. Or, upload them to a file sharing site, such as MediaFire.
 
I worked for Syntrex from 1980 to 1982 in the development department.....

Yes, it's an Aquarius dedicated word processor, which used the keyboard from an electronic typewriter (initially IBM Selectric, then Oivetti when they bought 25% interest in the company) and the printer part of the typewriter as the printer.

The OS was done in-house with several people who used to work at Bell Labs, so the OS is sort of UNIX-like.....ALL the development was done in NJ, and Olivetti ONLY did the language translations for foreign markets.

The system could also use a stand alone keyboard and shared daisy-wheel printer (which was smart for its day, and was capable of bidirectional printing) when configured withe the Gemini storage system. Gemini was a completely redundant hard drive based system which supported 8 (I think) terminals. Later in the development, an attampt was made to add a local hard drive to make it more PC-like, but I don't know if it was ever produced.

The OS/system was quite advanced, and interfaced with the sophisticated display hardware on the motherboard to do soft scrolling on the CRT. It was really slick.

Again, the OS was most definitely NOT CP/M based. The Gemini communications link was a synchronous connection, and the printer was RS-232.

Ask any questions that you wish....I'll do my best to answer them.
 
Hello, crusader 27529!
I too worked for Syntrex, and during the same period... although I might have started in 1979.
I worked in their Quality Control department, for a guy named Al Gross, a kindly older man who had a perpetual cigar going (that was THEN, remember!).
Yes, I recall the Olivetti units, that were specially silk-screened with the Olivetti logo, and they had a representative from Italy on the premises for final inspection. Our job was to not only inspect the machines for cosmetic damage, but to "fire up" the units and check the screens for text sharpness, alignment, etc. Yes, the two slots shown in the photo above were for floppy disks; we had special ones used to test the units.
I also worked for another Manager whose name I cannot recall, he drove a VW Beetle and was also a Ham Radio operator. We met Dan Sinnott, the co-founder, and he was a down-to-earth guy who had a great rapport with his employees.
If I can remember any other details about the units, I will post them.
 
Riososa68 said:
Hello, crusader 27529!
I too worked for Syntrex, and during the same period... although I might have started in 1979.

Our job was to not only inspect the machines for cosmetic damage, but to "fire up" the units and check the screens for text sharpness, alignment, etc. Yes, the two slots shown in the photo above were for floppy disks; we had special ones used to test the units.
Click to expand...

I'm familiar with the 'special' floppy disks used to test them......I wrote the code you were using for the testing, plus all the other non-application code used in the company.

Production didn't get going with Olivetti probably until 1981, so your dates are skewed a little, but we're all getting old.

BTW, my real name is Geoffrey McDermott......and I started with Syntrex before we had out building....we worked in a warehouse.
 
I realize this thread is really old, but seeing that Aquarius brought back some memories. I was a word processing operator in a Manhattan law firm from 1985 until 1990 and during that time they worked their way through the entire Syntrex product line. Libra, Aquarius, Gemini and so on. I'm not clear on the names anymore. The last system they had was a LAN using five or six Syntrex fileservers (they looked like tower PCs) connected together with a thick ethernet backbone. I don;t recall how the workstations connected to these. It was probably a proprietary cabling system, hooking up via some kind of concentrator. Users were divided across the fileservers, but had the ability to "cross the net" to work on documents on other servers.

It was an expensive setup, but because all secretaries and word processors were now networked, a secretary could now work for three attorneys instead of just one. Documents were no longer stored on diskette. It facilitated resource sharing. They expected that the networking could get them more work done faster, and for less money.

In general, Syntrex software was outstanding. Extremely stable and super advanced for its time. This was years before the IBM PC. It had complex management features with full tape backup, archiving and restore capability, a sophisticated mail-merge function, and great reporting features. It had a CP/M emulator and we ran a custom timekeeping app on it, written in dBASE II. There was even a game for it -- a Zork-style dungeons game which ran on an Aquarius. It was on a special bootable diskette.

The last product that I'm aware of was an IBM AT clone which could dual boot to DOS or Syntrex (Taurus?). I think it was around that time that major development stopped, and law firms began their migration to WordPerfect in earnest. I was playing with QuickBasic at the time and I wrote a utility program that could convert Syntrex primary merge files into WordPerfect merge files, which became part of the conversion to WordPerfect.

I heard a rumor that development stopped on Syntrex because the primary architect/developer died and the source code could not be located. Or maybe it was a mess of spaghetti code and no one could figure it out. But whatever the reason, Syntrex wasn't around much longer after that.

The only product they ever sold that I completely despised was the laser printer they remarketed for the dual-booting PC, which they called "Synjet". It jammed constantly and we renamed it "Jamjet".
 
Syntrex History

Syntrex History

I haven't been to this forum for a while(obviously), and I left Syntrex after 2 years, in 1981. Sytrex died because of poor financial management.

If I recall, a company namer Lanier Business System, was a major competitor to Syntrex, and theybget into financial difficuly, and in order to get their customer base, they purchased Lanier. The debt that Lanier added to the company was more than the company could support, and it went donwhill from there.

The story of the primary developer dieing is NOT related to SW, but HW. The principle HW architect was a gut named Dave Ratcliff(originally from Endland), and he died from surgical complications, just after the basis HW design was complete. It was a blow to the compant, but we had a very talented engineering staff that took over after his loss, and successfully marketed the Aqurius terminal. The HW did the soft scrolling, with very minor control from SW, and was implemented in plain TTL logic. It was an amaizingly elegant/complex system, but worked beautifully. I started with Syntrex just after Dave died(I knew him when he was the lead engineer for a company that designed a daisy wheel printer, similar to the Diablo printers. It was strange that we both ended up at Syntrex eventually. He was a great guy.

The SW guys were every way as good as the HW people were, and the system worked on an Intel 8086 running at 8MHZ, and the performance they got out of the system was primarily due to the Unix-like software. The kernal was built by a gut named Charles Haley who worked with the K&R pair who invented the C language, and designed the initial Unix. The rest of the SW was done be a talented buch of programmers(mostly from Bell Labs) nmanaged by Phil Chevren and Scott Hendersen, all very smart. I was initially the only SW person(I really am a HW person) that wasn't part of the primary SW support. I wrote ALL the code used for diagnostics, manufacturing support & testing, and eventually had 3 others working for me.

So, that's the story as I lived and remember it. I'm currently retired, living in NC along the coast.

919-376-6741
 
I worked for Syntrex 1988-1989 in the Dallas, TX sales office.

This was back when we wore a suit/tie all day. The company actually gave us a "clothing allowance" each year to buy suits.

All of our clients were law firms in the Dallas area with most being in downtown. Very fancy old school offices at these law firms.


I worked mainly on Banyan Vines and Novell Netware, and doing migrations from Syntrex or WANG to WordPerfect.

I remember the older Syntrex systems and they were proprietary word processing systems and compete against WANG word processing systems.

I believe they were UNIX based at the core and I remember that the Gemini system was fully redundant. Each system was connect to each other via Thick Ethernet.

I do have a friend who I worked with that was a specialist on those system (Karl Houston). He would much more details.
 
I worked for a Syntrex dealer in Buffalo/Rochester NY from 1079-1991. I installed and maintained numerous Aquarius, AQII, Libra, Tauris, Gemini, Polaris and Virgo systems during that time. I would be happy to share my experiences and knowledge here if anyone is interested. I visited the HQ first in Piscataway and then in Eatontown NJ many times. Those were great times. We were on the bleeding edge of technology and i loved it!!! Happy to see this blog is alive too.
 
Just checking in. I have gotten into collecting vintage computers and have been looking for any Syntrex hardware to add to my collection and have come up empty.
 
I worked for Syntrex in 1986 and 1987 (basically my first real job after my Masters). I worked in firmware/software development and then networking. My main projects were to create a redundant version on their file servers to replace the earlier Gemini with industry standard x86 hardware. I think we called Dual Virgo.

Then a deal was entered into with Banyan to use their networking to replace the proprietary Syntrex networking and I was working on that, while also porting the client SW to x86/Windows.

It was a cool company to work for as everything was developed and manufactured in house in the same building.

I left in 1987 or 1988, after moving to Eatontown just the year before :)

Scott Handerson left for Apollo and asked me to go interview there. In the process I got a ton of unsolicited head hunting hits and ended up consulting for IBM after a stint at Concurrent Computer. I think right after I left things started turning bad quickly and people starting to leave and I sadly lost touch with everyone.

I was searching for a Wiki or any info on Syntrex, and was surprised not to find any.

Would be cool to see/hear more about Syntrex.
 
Great to see the historical information from former employees of Syntrex. I helped to implement a multi-office insurance policy production system using Syntrex word processors at SAFECO Title Insurance Company in California. I still have some Aquarius II systems. Don't know if I can find the boot disks and documents at the moment. It was a magnificent word processing system with embedded formatting codes. It had a system to automate content production so that standard documents could be created with stopping points for operators to fill in the variablle information. At SAFECO Title, we used Syntrex to replace IBM selectric typewriter systems that were controlled through punched paper tape readers, and later through magnetic cards. The embedded Syntrex formatting codes and macro instructions were much like those that Word Perfect would later adopt for their IBM PC software product. I alway suspected that the ideas behind Word Perfect codes were derived from the Syntrex system. Syntrex equipment was built like a rock, very reliable. The redundant shared storage systems used mirrored 8-inch hard disk drives and could be daisy chained with thick coax Ethernet. This was all before the arrival of the IBM PC, which became the great disruptor for dedicated word processing systems.
 
slowtony said:
Great to see the historical information from former employees of Syntrex. I helped to implement a multi-office insurance policy production system using Syntrex word processors at SAFECO Title Insurance Company in California. I still have some Aquarius II systems. Don't know if I can find the boot disks and documents at the moment. It was a magnificent word processing system with embedded formatting codes. It had a system to automate content production so that standard documents could be created with stopping points for operators to fill in the variablle information. At SAFECO Title, we used Syntrex to replace IBM selectric typewriter systems that were controlled through punched paper tape readers, and later through magnetic cards. The embedded Syntrex formatting codes and macro instructions were much like those that Word Perfect would later adopt for their IBM PC software product. I alway suspected that the ideas behind Word Perfect codes were derived from the Syntrex system. Syntrex equipment was built like a rock, very reliable. The redundant shared storage systems used mirrored 8-inch hard disk drives and could be daisy chained with thick coax Ethernet. This was all before the arrival of the IBM PC, which became the great disruptor for dedicated word processing systems.
Click to expand...
Greetings from NJ. I worked at Syntrex in 85-86 on the production floor and later shipping parts to our field offices in customer service. I collect vintage computers and other electronic tech from days gone by, and occasionally look for Syntrex tech to add to my collection. The only things I've been able to find is a coffee mug and a "Syntrex is always up" button, but no actual hardware. If you still have anything and would like to part with something maybe we can work something out. Syntrex was a pretty cool place to work, when they did software updates the field offices would send back the 5.25" disks and my boss would let me take them home to reformat and use on my Apple IIc.20211205_091551(1).jpg
 
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