15.1. Nixdorf 8870
It all started in 1976 when GEOBRA, the company that produces the toy system Playmobil, got a computer, a Nixdorf 8870 system.
At that time, the IBM PCs did not yet exist. They were released in August 1981 after only ten months of development time.
The Nixdorf system GEOBRA got had 40 kilobytes of main storage, a CPU processing approximately some thousand instructions per second, two disks with 6 megabytes each, and a terminal which displayed 12 lines with 80 characters each, in green color on a black background.
The cost of this Nixdorf 8870 system was 160,000 German D-Marks; the German D-Mark was always worth less than a US dollar.
Nixdorf was a German computer company, later acquired by Siemens, and after some years, all of Siemens IT solutions were sold to Fujitsu.
The Nixdorf 8870 CPU used 18 bits for addressing the main storage, an advantage over other minicomputers that used 16 bits to address the main storage.
The Nixdorf 8870 CPU has instructions for decimal logic based on packed numbers, similar to the IBM /370 mainframes.