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I know we have many friends from Welsh Wales on the forum ... so perhaps a word about Dragon is in order.

The Dragon Data Company was doing OK with its Dragon 32, then 64 and 200 machines. They had (have) Microsoft BASIC in ROM. Then it was bought by the Spanish company EuroHard S.A. (great name ... NOT), and it all went down the pan in 1986.

The final product was the Dragon MSX-64, which was really just another re-badged MSX clone from the Radofin company in Hong Kong.

If anyone can lay their hands on one of these ... well, they're like gold ... as the 500 produced were basically handed over to EuroHard staff (as wages) as the company folded.

PS: believe it or not, the Japanese MSX standard stood for:- Machines with Software eXchangeability!

Acorn still lives on in a way. The ARM processors that were originally developed for the Archimedes and RISCPC ( they were fantastic machines and light years ahead of Windows in their time! ) are now very widely used in mobile phone handsets today!

Hi Jonathan. Yes. The Reduced Instruction Set idea was (is) a brilliant idea (indeed, I would say, a stroke of genius)! Someone at Acorn must have had a truly Eureka! moment (...hence the choice of name for the successor to the BBC series, I reckon).

Actually, RISC is something I know very little about ... and I look forward to finding out more about it.

So, who carries the RISC/ARM torch these days, do you reckon? After all, it can't be Acorn (regrettably). Yet another example of British innovation being capitalized upon by others?

Someone has just pointed me in this direction. I'll have a look through it when I get a bit of time.

And for those who can spare the time to get involved in yet another forum:- look here.

Here's a nice link ... if only for the logo's.

I still have a Dragon 32 somewhere...

(I have two sitting on the pile right next to me ... how sad is that?)

Working ones geoff?

Should be OK, but they're really sitting there waiting for me to find the time to check them out. Interestingly enough, it looks like (due to the screw covers still being in place) they've never been opened up! That will have to change, of course. I might add that one of them is well yellowed. But the other looks in great shape (and still in its original box and polystyrene). Cymru Am Byth!

I bet some of you guys would of loved to work on this beast I had to support some of these for a while. This was like something out of lost in space with the lamps flashing away as it chunked along.

When it stopped working, more often or not cleaning all the edge connectors would get it going again. It must of been a real gem back in 1968, but I was supporting it as late as 1993

If you want to see it in operation check out this you-tube footage:
Cutting edge