The conception, the formative months and the birth
Rumours abounded in the summer of 1982 that a little known UK toy manufacturer was about to make an entrance into the home computer market. At that time Sinclair Research, pioneers of the early home computing scene in the UK, were having difficulties with there new machine - the Spectrum - and it was doubtful that a newcomer with such a lack of experience would be able to break into such a competitive market. Then the Dragon 32 was launched in August by Dragon Data Ltd (a subsidiary of Mettoy). For its time it was a good and powerful design but many were sceptical as the parent toy company appeared to be in serious financial difficulties.
The Dragon 32 was a revolutionary design - for the UK at least - in that it broke away from tradition and offered a Motorola MC6809E microprocessor at its heart instead of the more popular, but less powerful, Zilog Z80 and Mostek 6502 ICs. This would appear to be a wise decision for it would make the programmers' tasks less daunting, but not many had seen these devices before - the popular machines of the market were the 6502 based Apple II and Commodore PET ranges, plus the early Tandy and Sinclair models of Z80 origin. But in the United States, Tandy had 2 years earlier released their Color Computer to great success - and this was a 6809 design using a standard Motorola chipset for the video display and interfacing.
Mettoy's staff were in close contact with Motorola at their UK semi-conductor base in Strathclyde (Scotland), and with their help (and offer of bigger discounts for purchasing more Motorola products) they constructed the Dragon from the same chipset as Tandy were using. The machine of questionable copyright even used the same keyboard layout, cartridge connector, joystick ports (Tandy 5-pin could be used, but not 6-pin due the Dragon's use of 5-pin DIN sockets), and memory map. You could also say that the tape connector was the same but as this was a standard, its hardly worth mentioning. [[Dragon Data Ltd]; like Tandy/Radio Shack; enlisted Microsoft to provide the computer's Basic interpreter, but unlike Tandy they chose Extended Basic so all of the machines features could be unleashed with no upgrades necessary - witness the early Tandy models with no hires graphics. Admittedly this was partly due to these machines possessing pitiful amounts of memory (4K or 16K), but Mettoy worked around this by making their machine 32K: it was to be 16K, but Sinclair announced that another Spectrum model would be launched soon after the 16K version had arrived, and that it would have an extra 32K of RAM on board. Mettoy didn't want to be left behind in the technological stakes.
To solve possible legal action from Tandy, the Dragon engineers came up with a work-around solution. A parallel printer socket would be included instead of the serial device on their counterparts machine; this was a better solution for the end-user wishing to connect a printer because no setting up is needed - plug in and go - no messy dip switches to set baud rate and parity etc. So that the electronics would be simpler, the printer data lines would use the same Motorola MC6821 PIA port as the keyboard - this allowed the keyboard to be remapped also, so that it looked the same as a Tandy, but operated differently (e.g. Dragon Q is Tandy 1). Most importantly though the Basic ROM had the keyword 'tokens' reworked and re-assembled so that both the Basic and Extended Basic parts were mixed, and as Tandy's were separate the routines addresses would be at different locations. Part of this re-assembly included a partially re-written BIOS (the original belonged to Tandy) - witness the the letters DNS appearing for no-reason, as these are the authors initials; Duncan Smeed who before joining Dragon lectured in computing at Strathcylde University (where he has since returned).
So the Dragon had been born. The idea of getting into the lucrative home computer market by a Mettoy employee keen to save the company had been conceptualized and launched to a waiting public. Although they had pulled a large coup by persuading Boots; the large high-street chain whose stores were traditionally pharmacies which stocked health and beauty products too, but now also included photographic equipment, calculators, tape-recorders and toys (including Mettoy's products); to take their machine, the unexpectedly high demand (mostly due to the problems Acorn and Sinclair had in supplying Electrons and Spectrums to shops - concentrating on mail-order instead) outstripped supply, and the fairy tale for Mettoy was not to last
The full wiki on this can be found here : http://archive.worldofdragon.org/index. ... on_History
And HT, this being a British thing , how many do you have?
