Dragon Data
Dragon Data Ltd. was a Welsh company that manufactured home computers based on the Motorola MC6809E microprocessor , the SN74LS783 / MC6883 Synchronous Address Multiplexer (SAM) and the MC6847 Video Display Generator (VDG). The I / O interface was implemented with an MC6821 Peripheral Interface Adapter (PIA).
The manufactured computers Dragon 32 and 64 are very similar in their basic construction to the Tandy TRS-80 ("CoCo"). The standard BASIC interpreter ( Microsoft BASIC ) is 16K in size and was supplied by Microsoft .
Dragon Data's corporate history was relatively short and took place between 1982 and 1984. The company originally emerged from the toy company Mettoy (Mettoy Playcraft Ltd.). Right at the start of the machine's sale, sales were very high and it looked like Dragon Data had a bright future. At the height of its business development, Dragon Data began negotiations with Tano in order to enter the US market. Mettoy then had economic problems, so that Dragon Data was separated from the parent company. Due to technical problems in the production of the computers, some of which no longer corresponded to the market standards of other home computers of the time, the company lost market share.
To counteract this development, Dragon Data developed new computer models (Dragon Alpha and Beta), but they did not go beyond the prototype . Then Dragon Data was sold to the Spanish startup Eurohard SA in 1984 , which also gave up a few years later.
literature
- Smeed, D. & Sommerville, I. (1983). Inside the Dragon . Addison-Wesley ISBN 0-201-14523-5
Web links
- A Slayed Beast - History of the Dragon computer , from The DRAGON Archive (English)
- Private website with the theme Dragon Data (English)