Before The 3000
Long before the Izarra 3000 became the computer that could have been, Izarra was a practical office company in Zamudio, Bizkaia. Mikel Etxeberria and Txema Goikoetxea opened the shop in 1982 in this building, half workshop, half storeroom, with a repair bench in the back.
Mikel was the hardware person. He had started out repairing calculators, dictation machines, and daisy wheel printers, and he was happiest with a board on the bench and a notebook full of voltages. Txema knew the customers. He had spent years selling office equipment to schools, town halls, workshops, and small factories, and he could tell pretty quickly which features were worth money and which ones were brochure fluff.
Their first bet was not glamorous, but it paid the bills: electronic typewriters that local offices could keep running without shipping them away for service.
Typewriters First
The typewriters were pretty average, honestly. Solid enough, easy enough to service, and not much more romantic than that. The factory also did parts work for Olivetti typewriters, which was the sort of steady manufacturing job that kept the lights on.
That work taught Izarra two habits that stuck around: keep the machine repairable, and listen to people who use it eight hours a day. By the late 80s, though, the market had changed. Customers who used to ask for a better typewriter were asking whether they should buy a PC instead.
The Workstation Years
Some Spanish magazines liked calling Izarra "the Basque Amiga": not a generic clone, but a small computer line with its own hardware choices, its own operating system, and a company that wanted to own the whole experience. That made Izarra interesting. It also made Izarra expensive.
- 1982
Izarra opens. Mikel handles boards and repairs. Txema handles customers, parts, and the painful job of getting paid on time.
- 1986
The office line grows. Izarra adds service contracts, memory upgrades, and small batches of custom typewriter firmware for bigger clients.
- 1988
The shift to computing starts. Izarra does not just rebadge AT compatibles. It starts building custom workstations for offices moving out of typewriters, with familiar DOS software running on Izarra's own stack.
- 1990
Izarra 1000. The first Izarra computer is a 286 workstation for schools and small offices. The custom parts cost more, but at this scale the price still makes sense.
- 1992
Izarra 2000. The 386 model brings better graphics options, more expansion room, and a newer Toka-DOS build for heavier office software.
- 1994
Izarra 2700. The 486 machine pushes harder into home and multimedia use, especially once CD-ROM drives and sound cards become normal.
- 1997
Izarra 3000. The 586-class machine is meant to launch with Toka-DOS 3.0, but it lands in a Windows 95 world and never reaches stores.
The Last Machine
The Izarra 3000 was the big swing. By then Izarra was not trying to be another beige AT-compatible box. The plan was a custom 586-class workstation with its own BIOS, Toka-DOS 3.0, VEGA graphics, and ReSonique sound. The pitch was a complete Izarra computer, hardware and software lined up from the start.
That worked better in the early days, when a custom 286 or 386 could still make sense for a school, a workshop, or a town hall that wanted one supplier to own the whole setup. By the time Izarra reached the 3000, the same habit had made the machine expensive.
It was also the wrong moment. Desktop computing had already moved to Windows 95, and the Izarra 3000 did not run it. Toka-DOS was MS-DOS-compatible, but that was no longer enough for buyers who expected their new machine to live in the Windows world.
So the Izarra 3000 became the machine people talked about in the past tense before most people had ever seen one. What survived were photos, manuals, BIOS dumps, half-finished developer notes, and enough stubborn affection for the computer that IzarraVM now has something to preserve.