Compis


Compis, Scandis 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. 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:
Some schools had simple local area networks of Compis/Scandis computers, in which 10–20 machines shared one hard disk with a typical capacity of 10MB.