Memotech MTX512 computer Memotech was a British computer company founded by Geoff Boyd and Robert Branton in

Witney Witney is a market town on the River Windrush in West Oxfordshire in the county of Oxfordshire, England. It is west of Oxford. The place-name "Witney" is derived from the Old English for "Witta's island". The earliest known record of it is as ...

Oxfordshire Oxfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the north west of South East England. It is a mainly rural county, with its largest settlement being the city of Oxford. The county is a centre of research and development, primarily ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

. They started out during the early 1980s producing memory expansion packs ("RAMpacks") and other hardware expansions for the

Sinclair ZX81 The ZX81 is a home computer that was produced by Sinclair Research and manufactured in Dundee, Scotland, by Timex Corporation. It was launched in the United Kingdom in March 1981 as the successor to Sinclair's ZX80 and designed to be a low-cost ...

. However, they eventually went on to develop and sell their own MTX family of computers in 1983. The range included the following models: MTX500, MTX512 and RS128. The MTX 512 was based on the

Zilog Z80 The Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor introduced by Zilog as the startup company's first product. The Z80 was conceived by Federico Faggin in late 1974 and developed by him and his 11 employees starting in early 1975. The first working samples wer ...

processor. Although well-regarded, these computers were not commercially successful, and the company went into

receivership In law, receivership is a situation in which an institution or enterprise is held by a receiver—a person "placed in the custodial responsibility for the property of others, including tangible and intangible assets and rights"—especially in ca ...

in 1985.

History

In 1984, the Norwegian company Norbit Elektronikk Norge A/S run by A. S. Fiko developed a complete

Input/Output In computing, input/output (I/O, or informally io or IO) is the communication between an information processing system, such as a computer, and the outside world, possibly a human or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals ...

(I/O) control system with 4× 16-bits by using the blue Memotech 8-bit

Dual in-line package In microelectronics, a dual in-line package (DIP or DIL), is an electronic component package with a rectangular housing and two parallel rows of electrical connecting pins. The package may be through-hole mounted to a printed circuit board (P ...

DIL socket for I/O controls. The socket was located on the computer

motherboard A motherboard (also called mainboard, main circuit board, mb, mboard, backplane board, base board, system board, logic board (only in Apple computers) or mobo) is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expand ...

. Norbit Elektronikk used their Super ToolBox system and was able to use 16-bits by adding two data blocks of 8 bits at the same time. Digital I/O ports,

Analog-to-digital converter In electronics, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC, A/D, or A-to-D) is a system that converts an analog signal, such as a sound picked up by a microphone or light entering a digital camera, into a digital signal. An ADC may also provide ...

and

Digital-to-analog converter In electronics, a digital-to-analog converter (DAC, D/A, D2A, or D-to-A) is a system that converts a digital signal into an analog signal. An analog-to-digital converter (ADC) performs the reverse function. There are several DAC architec ...

with all kind of sensor systems for robotics and controls were developed. The control system was designed for the same aluminum casing as the main MTX512 unit. In 1984/85 Memotech was working on a huge project to deliver the

CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...

-based MTX512 together with the FDX and the control unit from Norbit Elektronikk to 64,000 schools in the

USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

Popular Computing Weekly
To Russia with love with the potentials to sell about 200,000 units. The USSR was at that time under

embargo Economic sanctions are commercial and financial penalties applied by one or more countries against a targeted self-governing state, group, or individual. Economic sanctions are not necessarily imposed because of economic circumstances—they m ...

by the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

, and companies were not allowed to deliver the new

IBM Personal Computer The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team ...

with

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

to USSR. CP/M computers were not included in the Soviet embargo blockage and Memotech's MTX512 was therefore a good option. Memotech went into

in 1985. A contributing factor, beyond the poor commercial success of the MTX, was the substantial investment Memotech made in preparing the MTX512 for the Soviet deal. This required a red brushed aluminum case instead of the black (made at a factory in the

Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...

), Russian BASIC, Russian

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to Graphics, graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of Language, human language, allowing them to be Data storage, stored, Data communication, transmi ...

, Russian keyboard and Russian documentation. Memotech worked with a professor at

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

for the internationalization. The Soviet government was also evaluating computer systems from other home computer manufacturers. Memotech was relying on the British government for funding the project, but ultimately, they only received about £1m and did not receive the full funding required. As a result, Memotech required cash payments from the USSR prior to supplying the 64,000 computers. The Soviets decided against this cash deal and instead agreed to acquire MSX computers from

Yamaha Yamaha may refer to: * Yamaha Corporation, a Japanese company with a wide range of products and services, established in 1887. The company is the largest shareholder of Yamaha Motor Company (below). ** Yamaha Music Foundation, an organization estab ...

(another later big deal was with

Daewoo Daewoo ( ; Hangul: , Hanja: , ; literally "great universe" and a portmanteau of "dae" meaning great, and the given name of founder and chairman Kim Woo-choong) also known as the Daewoo Group, was a major South Korean chaebol (type of conglomerat ...

) with bartering mainly in steel and oil. Only a few thousand MSX computers were supplied to USSR schools and other educational institutions MEMOTECH to USSR
The Sovjet deal before the deal went dead. The main reason was the USSR thought that MSX was the new

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

Operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

. Since Memotech lost the deal to the USSR, and they had invested all their money in the project, money that was borrowed from the banks, plus the £1m funding from the UK government, Memotech went bankrupt. Some of the Memotech inventions still lived on, as several employees took some of Memotech's new video editing systems for televisions back to the USA. As a result of Memotech's bankruptcy, the UK government stopped funding to all computer manufacturers in the UK at that time, including

Sinclair Sinclair may refer to: Places * Lake Sinclair, near Milledgeville, Georgia * Sinclair, Iowa * Sinclair, West Virginia * Sinclair, Wyoming * Sinclair Mills, British Columbia * Sinclair Township, Minnesota * Sinclair, Manitoba People * ...

Acorn The acorn, or oaknut, is the nut of the oaks and their close relatives (genera ''Quercus'' and '' Lithocarpus'', in the family Fagaceae). It usually contains one seed (occasionally two seeds), enclosed in a tough, leathery shell, and borne ...

and

Apricot An apricot (, ) is a fruit, or the tree that bears the fruit, of several species in the genus ''Prunus''. Usually, an apricot is from the species '' P. armeniaca'', but the fruits of the other species in ''Prunus'' sect. ''Armeniaca'' are also ...

Successors

Robert Branton had left the company in 1985 as the financial situation deteriorated and when Memotech Limited folded, Geoff Boyd acquired the assets of the old company and re-launched the company as Memotech Computers Limited in February 1986. Boyd continued to market and support the MTX500, MTX512 and RS128 with the final MTX computer, the MTX512S2 being released late in 1986.

Notes

References

* *

External links

Binary Dinosaurs: Memotech page
{{Use British English, date=March 2015 Home computer hardware companies Electronics companies of the United Kingdom Computer companies of the United Kingdom Defunct computer companies of the United Kingdom