The tatung was designed in bradford, UK, then manufactured in Korea, 4MHz Z80, 64KB of RAM (upgraded to a 256k option by the EOL), AY-3910 sound, 2x 3" floppy drives built in, a built in 80 column monitor, and a video system comparable to the MSX, it ran CPM, which meant it had access to a plethora of good Z80 assemblers, Turbo Pascal, Wordstar, and other useful dev tools (including hisoft C). The 3" drives meant that it had a native advantage for the spectrum +3, CPC 6128, and amstrad PCW since it was trivial to write a disk writer to write native disks for those systems.
As a system of it's own standing, ignoring the MSX software catalog, which was largely unavailable in the UK, it was probably the best Z80 system by specs until the Elan/Flan/Enterprise 128* finally was released; which upped the high-tide mark for Z80 systems even further with again CPM compatibility (requiring a 3rd party copy of CPM though) and amazing hardware.
Both the Einstein and Enterprise were commercial failures for the most part, to the point that in early 1986 I was presented by Dixons offering either the Einstein or the Atari 130XE on a massive discount at £50. I chose poorly and picked the 130XE, which turned out to be the last one they had in stock, had 100% ram failure, and Dixons were unable to repair it under warranty. I still wish I'd gone with the more useful Einstein.
In the early 90s, you'd often find Einstein's knocking around in storage rooms of most UK development studios from when they got adopted as dev machines. Sometimes you'd find a PCW or 2 too, again CPM and the 3" disks rendering it useful.
As a system of it's own standing, ignoring the MSX software catalog, which was largely unavailable in the UK, it was probably the best Z80 system by specs until the Elan/Flan/Enterprise 128* finally was released; which upped the high-tide mark for Z80 systems even further with again CPM compatibility (requiring a 3rd party copy of CPM though) and amazing hardware.
Both the Einstein and Enterprise were commercial failures for the most part, to the point that in early 1986 I was presented by Dixons offering either the Einstein or the Atari 130XE on a massive discount at £50. I chose poorly and picked the 130XE, which turned out to be the last one they had in stock, had 100% ram failure, and Dixons were unable to repair it under warranty. I still wish I'd gone with the more useful Einstein.
In the early 90s, you'd often find Einstein's knocking around in storage rooms of most UK development studios from when they got adopted as dev machines. Sometimes you'd find a PCW or 2 too, again CPM and the 3" disks rendering it useful.
There's lots of Einstein info here:
http://www.tatungeinstein.co.uk/
And info on the Enterprise should that tickle your curiosity here:
http://www.oldcomputermuseum.com/enterprise-128.html