Changes

Richard Clayton

Chris Hall and I founded it in February 1983. We were going to build an add-on board for the IBM PC (which was really new then and we much admired it, but it was too slow!). We raised some money from a Government grant to build a board centred around the National Semiconductor NS16032 (later called the 32016!). But we started the company the day we did (Valentine's Day), because we had a contract from Acorn Computers to build them a Microsoft BASIC clone to run on their add-on board for the BBC Micro.

The BASIC for AcornAmstrad PCW-8256

We did a lot of things, but I think the PCW was the thing we built that really changed people's lives. It was an icon of the 80s

When Roland Perry brought round the first unit, at the end of August 1983, I opened it up -- which upset him because he'd obscured the logo on the outside case, but hadn't thought to do that on the PCB. (We were the first people who were interested enough to peek inside...)

I saw the name and didn't pay it much heed -- I thought they were Japanese :)

In the games market, I'm deeply impressed by the amount of silicon used these days to get the graphics to go really fast.

We thought we'd done a pretty good job and I still do

We had the main part already, from the Acorn project. All the rest (the commands that accessed the hardware and operating system (timers etc)) we built between September 1983 and very early January 1984

We were very influenced by what Acorn had done with BBC Basic but we wanted to avoid the cryptic *FX stuff as far as possible, so we added lots of keywords. We also wanted to be able to show off what the machine could do, graphics, sound etc from the BASIC, so you could get fancy things like synchronised music and movement without having to learn to program it in assembler

The hardware worked very well (Mej's firm built an emulator for the ASIC so we had something running for much of the time)

We did have some problems with recording information on the tape. We had some fancy pre-compensation to get the fastest possible speeds, and we'd found it worked better if we set the pre-comp different for "0" and "1"

Then we were shipped a new unit from Japan and it stopped working. When we looked into it we found that a Japanese engineer had also spotted the difference between "0" and "1" and had fixed the circuitry to make them more identical. When we set the pre-comp the same, it all worked again!

I'm amazed we did it in the time we had

We were very excited to build a Word Processor for that price. We had a background of building word processors when they cost 10,000 pounds each and we were going to have something better for just 300 pounds. That was just amazing

I think the CPC was more exciting because it was first

I only met Alan a few times and thought him a very clever man, though he tried hard to pretend that he wasn't :)

We'd known Mej for years ... he built the hardware for the 10,000 pound word processors!

LocoScript 2

It depends when and for what market... after all the IBM PC was remarkable - just a bit slow

CPC464

The 664 was squeezed by events, which wasn't entirely its fault!

It was a shame not to build the "Ant" -- which was going to be the games machine that shared a lot of hardware design with the PCW ("Joyce"). But we just didn't have the time and effort to do it justice so perhaps it was best that it was cancelled.

Not enough holidays

Currently I'm studying for a PhD in the Computer Security group at Cambridge University (yes, even at my age!)

Everyone should have a hobby :)

Perhaps taking nostalgia too far ... I think you have to see these machines as being of their time, so try and view them in terms of what you could run on them back then