Umtech

Umtech Incorporated., also known as the VideoBrain Computer Company, was an early entrant in the personal computer market that developed, manufactured, and marketed the first computer, VideoBrain, sold in department stores. Although VideoBrain generated major excitement and strong orders when it was introduced at the January 1978 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), consumers did not adopt it as readily as hoped. The company halted manufacturing in the spring of 1979 and was folded into the structure of its largest financial backer, the Cha Group.

Umtech was founded in 1976 by Dr. Albert Yu, an integrated circuit engineering manager at Intel who became Umtech’s President, and Dr. David Chung who led development of the F8 processor for Fairchild Semiconductor. The company was backed financially by Dr. Yu’s father-in-law, Cha Chi Ming, the principal of the Cha Group headquartered in Hong Kong. Some employees of the company later became minor shareholders through the exercise of employee stock options.

The company created the name VideoBrain for the computer it developed and then used the name VideoBrain Computer Company in marketing.

The company developed two chips to facilitate displaying the computer’s output on a standard color television set. The UM1 chip controlled sixteen rectangular objects on the screen that could be manipulated in size and shape, placement on the screen, and image within the rectangle. Software could designate the color of the image and of the remaining space within the rectangle, usually the background color of the display which was also software selectable. The UM1 was in turn controlled by an F8 processor. The UM1 fed a stream of pixels into a FIFO buffer which passed them along to be converted into signals that were delivered to the RF antenna input of a television set. Because the UM1 delivered the pixels needed for every line on the raster scan of the TV, rather than using the same pixel stream for every two or more adjacent lines as in then current video games, the VideoBrain produced finer display resolution than most television sets could support. The UM1 chip (Patent #4,232,374) was designed by John Cosley and Len Chen under the direction of Dr. Chung.

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