Beginnings Through the mid-1970s,
Clive Sinclair's firm
Sinclair Radionics entered a period of financial difficulties. This led to investment from the
National Enterprise Board (NEB) in 1976 to ensure the company did not foreclose. The NEB had formed the previous year to nationalize technology companies considered critical to the UK. Seeing his management of the company would suffer, Sinclair dusted off a company he had purchased and left unused, a
shelf company, and formed
Sinclair Instrument. He asked Radionics employee
Christopher Curry to start it up, and in July 1977, Sinclair Instrument was renamed
Science of Cambridge Ltd. Around the same time, Curry was introduced to a new small computer designed by Ian Williamson that combined a
National Semiconductor SC/MP central processing unit (CPU) with parts from one of Sinclair's calculator designs. Curry put this on the market as the
MK14 in June 1978, for the very low price of £40. Curry wanted to start the development of a larger machine similar to the
Apple II, but the company simply didn't have the funds to develop it. In 1978, the NEB agreed to fund the development of such a machine at Radionics, instead of Science of Cambridge. This prompted Curry to leave the company, and partner with
Hermann Hauser to form
Acorn Computers. At Radionics, development began with Mike Wakefield as the designer and Basil Smith as the software engineer. In early 1979, the NEB sold off Radionics' calculator product lines. In July, Sinclair had enough of the NEB and quit, moving to Science of Cambridge. In return, the NEB renamed Radionics to Sinclair Electronics in September and the company was dedicated to bringing the new machine to market. Meanwhile, at Science of Cambridge, Sinclair began the development of a much simpler machine with the goal of hitting a sub-£100 price point. This would emerge in early 1980 as the
ZX80. The company was renamed Sinclair Research in 1981 and the upgraded
ZX81 launched. In January 1980 the former Radionics once again renamed to become Thandar Electronics, but the 1979 Conservative government under
Margaret Thatcher began selling off government-owned properties and did so in this case by selling Thandar to Thurlby Electronics, who had no interest in the computer project. The NEB then transferred the computer project to another NEB-owned company, Newbury Laboratories. Newbury gave it the name NewBrain and announced the imminent release of three models, including a battery-powered portable computer. By this time the machine was no longer as innovative as it had been when first designed; in 1980
Personal Computer World said it was "significantly in advance of anything that had been seen in the field of handheld computing", but by the end of that year with the systems still not released, and it was not long before
Your Computer noted "the endless delays in its development mean that it has now lagged behind a new generation of personal computers."
BBC micro project In early 1980, the
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Further Education department conceived the idea of a computer literacy programme, principally in response to the impact of a 1979 six-part
ITV documentary series,
The Mighty Micro, in which
Dr Christopher Evans from the UK
National Physical Laboratory predicted the coming (micro) computer revolution. It was a very influential documentary — so much so that questions were asked in
Parliament. As a result of the questions in Parliament, the
Department of Industry (DoI) became interested in the programme. BBC Engineering was instructed to attempt to draw up an objective specification for a machine that the programme could be tailored to, and under pressure from the DoI, they wanted to choose a UK-built system. The market provided few alternatives, so the BBC specification was closely written around the NewBrain specification with the expectation they would bid on the project. The BBC released the specification in 1981, but at this time Newbury was nowhere near ready to go into production as they were having problems with the
uncommitted logic arrays (ULAs) that provided much of the customization. The BBC's programmes, initially scheduled for Autumn 1981, were moved back to Spring 1982. By this time, Sinclair and Curry had also heard of the project, and demanded they be allowed to bid on it. Sinclair were well down the road with the ZX80, which was a much simpler machine that could not come close to meeting the original specification. Curry visited the BBC and convinced them they were ready to go with a machine that could mostly meet the specification. Acorn won the contract. As a result of the BBC's decision, Newbury no longer had a launch customer for the NewBrain. The British Technology Group, which had replaced the NEB by this time, sold the final design and production rights to the recently formed Grundy Business Systems (GBS). GBS had formed in November with the intension of selling a machine similar to the
Intertec Superbrain, which combined a
VT100-like terminal with
floppy drives and a
CP/M 2.2-based computer. Looking for a way to enter the consumer market, they purchased the NewBrain, and announced a complete suite of machines.
Release By the summer of 1982, the company had been talking about the systems for some time, and the marketing department announced that the CP/M machines would be available beginning in January 1983, to be known as the Grundy 8200. This was a surprise to the engineering department, who stated it could not possibly be ready before April, although in the end they beat this date. Meanwhile, the company announced pre-orders for the NewBrain, and this produced a flood of orders during the Christmas 1982 season, leading the company to increase production to a target of 10,000 units a month. Machines began shipping in early 1983, but the sales efforts were ham-handed. Dealers were provided with no marketing material, few manuals and almost no software. Peripheral support was likewise spotty, and the
compact cassette systems used for program storage was particularly unreliable, but this fact was apparently not passed back from marketing to engineering. A better player was available from Japan, but had a 26-week lead time and could only deliver 120 a month. Other devices, like a computer-controlled cassette deck, a
plotter from Tandy and a low-cost modem were considered but never completed. Over 50,000 NewBrain units were sold to educational, scientific, industry, small business and banking sectors; as well as to home users. Scientific use was strong because of the unusually high precision of the NewBrain's floating point computations and its very high-resolution graphics. Business use was also proportionally high due to the availability of CP/M based software. The main industrial use was within the pharmaceutical industry. The computer was widely used by the
Angolan Government; the central planning of the Angolan Ministry of Commerce in 1981 - 1984 were made using this machine instead of much more expensive computers.
Demise Tradecom purchased
Grundy Business Systems in 1983 in order to fulfil a contract to supply microcomputers to schools and training centres in
the Netherlands. They created a server to which several NewBrains could use its floppy discs to load programs down the serial cable and simple switching enabled the teacher to view the screen of the students. They also demonstrated a keyboard with predictive text laid out in a non-QWERTY fashion. They were given television coverage, but the NewBrain's part in this was not mentioned. Tradecom's NewBrains were supplied entirely by existing stock. A press release was made of a new factory in India to provide NewBrains for the Indian market and to supply Europe, but nothing materialised.
Today The Dutch NewBrain user group has PDF downloads of various publications and a link to a Greek website that contains a PC-based emulator. The Dutch website has many of the programs that were available for the NewBrain, and these can be run on the emulator. == Models ==