CST Thor

The CST Thor series of personal computers were Sinclair QL-compatible systems designed and produced by Cambridge Systems Technology during the late 1980s.

The original Thor PC (also called Thor 1, sometimes also retrospectively referred to as the Thor 8), was launched in 1986, as a logical progression of CST's QL peripheral business after production of the QL was halted. The remaining stock of QL parts were purchased from Sinclair, and the standard QL motherboard (including a 7.5 MHz Motorola 68008 CPU and 128 KiB of RAM) was augmented with a CST-designed expansion board providing 512 KiB of additional RAM, extra ROMs, a non-volatile real-time clock, floppy disk, SCSI, Centronics parallel, IBM PC/AT-style keyboard and mouse interfaces enclosed in a low-profile metal desktop case with a built-in power supply. Mass storage options consisted of one (Thor 1F) or two (Thor 2F) 3.5-inch floppy drives or one floppy drive and one 20 MB Rodime RO652 SCSI hard disk (Thor 2WF). The ROMs contained Eidersoft's ICE GUI and some QDOS extensions. Also, supplied with the Thor was a specially-commissioned version of the Psion Xchange application software suite (an enhanced edition of the Psion applications bundled with the QL).

Prices for the Thor PC ranged from £599 to £1399, excluding monitor, mouse and VAT. An upgrade service for existing QLs was also available.

Total production of the Thor PC ran to around 1100 units.

The Thor 20 and Thor 21 were variants of the Thor PC launched in April 1987, fitted with a 68020 processor on a daughterboard in place of the original CPU. The new processor ran at 12.5 MHz, a 16.67 MHz option also being offered at higher cost. The Thor 21 was also fitted with the 68881 floating-point co-processor, running at the same speed as the CPU. Performance was significantly better than the Thor 1, but handicapped by the use of the 8-bit memory of the base system.

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