Grundy NewBrain

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GBS Newbrain AD with a French keyboard
GBS Newbrain AD with a French keyboard

The Grundy NewBrain was a microcomputer sold in the early 1980s by Grundy Business Systems Ltd of Teddington and Cambridge, England.

Contents

[edit] Beginnings

The NewBrain project was started in 1978 when Sinclair Radionics began design work with Mike Wakefield as the designer and Basil Smith as the software engineer. This project was intended to provide competition for Apple and hardly fitted in with Sinclair's focus on inexpensive consumer-oriented products. When it became obvious to Sinclair that the NewBrain could not be made for the sub-£100 price he envisaged his thoughts turned to the ZX80 that was to be developed by his other company, Science of Cambridge Ltd.

The NewBrain project was moved to Newbury Laboratories by the National Enterprise Board (NEB), the owner of both Sinclair Radionics and Newbury Labs, following the closure of Sinclair Radionics. In 1980 Newbury announced the imminent release of three NewBrain models, including a battery-powered portable computer.

[edit] 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. BBC Engineering was instructed to attempt to draw up an objective specification.

As a result of the questions in Parliament, the Department of Industry (DoI) became interested in the programme, as did BBC Enterprises, which saw an opportunity to sell a machine to go with the series.

Eventually, under some pressure from the DoI to choose a British system, the BBC 'chose' the NewBrain. The BBC specification was closely written around the NewBrain specification, with (presumably) the expectation that Newbury Laboratories would tender and win. It was not to be. Although the NewBrain was under heavy development by Newbury, it soon became clear that Newbury was not going to be able to produce it. Newbury did not tender (resulting in Clive Sinclair allegedly making the comment 'More no-brain than NewBrain') and opening the door for other companies. The BBC's programmes, initially scheduled for Autumn 1981, were moved back to Spring 1982. After Chris Curry and Clive Sinclair found out about the BBC's plans, the BBC allowed other manufacturers to submit their proposals. Chris Curry visited the BBC and persuaded them to change the specification so that Acorn could submit their design.

The BBC eventually chose a computer from Acorn Computers Ltd.

As a result of the BBC's decision, the British Technology Group, which had replaced the NEB, sold the final design and production to Grundy. Grundy had been looking for an entrant into the personal computer business, as they were already producing a CP/M 2.2-based machine, built into a 'dumb terminal' as a virtual clone of the Superbrain.

[edit] Available models

Two models were released. The 'A' model had display to either a TV or a monitor. The 'AD' included a one-line, 16-character, vacuum fluorescent (VF) display on the unit. Because programmers could not tell if the 'A' or 'AD' model was being used the VF display was mostly a curiosity, although it did permit operation without a TV screen or monitor - the VF display responded to the cursor keys and scrolled around the screen display area. One additional model was released, but this was a custom version for a pharmaceutical chain, with no screen display - only the VF display - and was never generally discussed.

An expansion chassis was released, providing additional paged memory of 64Kb. The Z80 can only address 64Kb of memory at a time. The paged memory system added the NewBrain to take advantage of several 64Kb modules. The expansion module included a parallel printer port and two hardware based serial ports and an expansion through bus for further modules such as the 8 and 16 way serial modules under development. The expansion module included Series 2 software, replacing those in the processor module as well as software for the new devices.

CP/M 2.2 was also available, although this was released late, and close to the demise of Grundy Business Systems. Under CP/M 2.2 the internal BASIC ROM was paged out for the CP/M ROM but this gave only 32Kb memory to CP/M. With the expansion module fitted the three 8Kb ROMS of the processor module where paged out to give the NewBrain one of the highest available TPA to CP/M. Grundy Business Systems released two 5.25" drive formats, 40 track 200Kb single sided and 80 track 800Kb double sided. Several independent dealers provided 40 track 400Kb double sided drive. In 1983 the Sony 3.5" was becoming available and single and paired units where being supplied to dealers in the NewBrain cream cases. The 3.5" 800Kb discs also got a more effective format allowing the files from 4x200Kb floppies to be stored on one 800Kb disc.

[edit] Commercial exploitation

Grundy failed to manage adequately the design or production of the NewBrain. The colour scheme (cream and brown) was chosen by default as being the colours available for the case of the terminals manufactured by Newbury Labs. The samples were made in cream and brown as cleaning the moulds for the proposed colour scheme (orange and silver) would have been too expensive. When it was agreed for production to begin the change in colour was not formally agreed and the cream and brown version became the production colours (ref. Gerald McMullon, editor of NBUG). Pricing was high for a monochrome computer (around £250 in 1983) when a colour computer (the ZX Spectrum) could be had for half that price. The computer was made up of extensive discrete logic components, when competitors were using logic arrays that greatly reduced the component count, so that the NewBrain was expensive to produce and assemble. (This was the reason why Clive Sinclair had, at Radionics, begun development of what would become the ZX-80, and did not attempt to reclaim the NewBrain project when the NEB sold off the intellectual rights of Sinclair Radionics.)

Advertising was poor, and available software was worse. Too much was in the form of crude BASIC programs, when competing machines were offering commercial software in machine code - thus, their offerings were smaller and faster. An 'optimisation' of the NewBrain was that BASIC was stored twice - once as a token scheme, and a second time as 'p-code', effectively a stack-based Forth-type scheme intended to allow the interpreter to call ROM routines more rapidly. However, this had the effect of slowing down large programs, as the p-code was generated, executed then discarded, and also reduced the data capacity because of the space allocated for the p-code. For its time the NewBrain was fast, allegedly because of the p-code approach, but at the time all personal computers were offering interpreted variants of BASIC. NewBrain marketing claimed that this was 'compiled' code, which produced little more than derision from the PC World review.

[edit] Software

The software was unusual. All I/O was stream-based, and orthogonal: any device could be replaced by an alternative, although the manual did warn that devices had to be chosen with care. Screen output could be sent to the keyboard device, although there would be no output, and input could be requested from the printer, although again little would happen. This approach did make it easy to write programs that could swap between input and output coming from a screen, keyboard or a tape.

The maths package was also unusual, having approximately 8 figures of accuracy and a dynamic range of approximately 10-150 to 10150, compared to most common machines having 6 figure accuracy and a dynamic range of 10-38 to 10+38. This was achieved by using base 256 for the floating point format, rather than the more common base 2, and using 10 bytes for storing numbers, rather than the more common four. Nine bytes stored the basic number, with the last byte storing the sign in the first bit, and the remaining seven bits storing the exponent. This approach, however, meant that the worst-case could lead to 7 of the top 8 bits storing effectively no information, losing 2-3 decimal figures of accuracy, unlike the base 2 methods.

The graphics screen was separate to the text screen, and was opened as a new output stream that shared space with the text screen. The graphics commands were based on 'turtle' keywords and provided a flexible means of drawing. The last two generations of NewBrain ROMs included new graphics commands - ROM 1.9 had two more commands, and ROM 2.0 some more. But to ensure compatibility little software would use these additional commands. The programmers were working on version 2.2 as well as versions for different keyboards, including Greek and Swedish as well as French and German. Grundy had been considered offering the Series 2 ROMS to existing users. This required the existing soldered in ROMS to be removed from the circuit board and a socket soldered in. The tight fit and labour cost was high on this retro fitting, and the failure of the company in 1983 meant that users were never aware that this was being considered.

The version of BASIC was an extended version of ANSI minimal BASIC, although it was described as an extended version of ANSI BASIC. Not surprisingly, its facilities were similar to those in standard Microsoft BASIC. The most apparent restriction was that variable names could only be a letter, or a letter followed by a digit; 'standard' Microsoft BASIC supported a letter followed by an alphanumeric, and BBC BASIC allowed names of up to 32 characters. There were no procedures, only the classical GOTO and GOSUB.

Grundy offered a 'Software Technical Manual' which was little more than an update to the documentation of original un-released models. This manual documented various routines that could be called in the ROM, but did not describe either the direct memory locations (which moved with various ROM releases) or the indirect calling approach (which was standard across all ROMs), although it describe the calling parameters. It was left to the NewBrain user groups to publish the details of how to access these routines through the indirect call (a low-memory address was called with the relevant routine parameters, and this address would call the ROM-specific location of a jump table which, in turn, then called the final routine.) Even screen access required this indirect use, as the screen location would change as new input and output streams were created, including high-resolution (for the time) greaphic streams. Memory maps and other technical information were included in numerous technical notes which where supplied to dealers and owners free of charge. The Technical Manual had a retain price of £50. The technical notes were provided by the user group NBUG, but by that time Grundy Business Systems had folded and the NewBrain had been sold on to Tradecom.

Grundy delivered late on expansions that may have helped keep the NewBrain competitive - the floppy disk controller was late, the expansion pack (with additional memory) was late, the 8 and 16 way serial module largely unknown, RAM packs sold only to dealers and Vestric. A number of modules were in development but were flaky at best, while some parts of the hardware did not work. Talk was made of a colour model that never got off the design board. The proposed battery pack, producing a 'portable' computer, was only delivered to Vestric who used the early production version with ROM based software before using the Model AD with ROM packs. Battery life was about 30 minutes, which Grundy recognized as impractical for release. Development of this portable model was discontinued due to the cost of CMOS components. When the NewBrain was first announced, in 1980 by Newbury, much had been made of the availability of a portable model. Proposed software offerings (Pascal, Comal, Assembler, text editor/word processor, a flight simulator) were never completed. HiSoft produced NewBrain versions of their Pascal compiler and editor. Unfortunately it supported little of the NewBrain's features, mainly the loading and saving to cassette tape or floppy disk and the basic text screen (no graphics). A number of CP/M applications were converted to using the NewBrain's CP/M terminal and made available on NewBrain 5.25" and 3.5" formatted diskettes. These included Z80 Assemblers and debuggers, Pro Pascal and Pro Fortran, TCL Pascal, dBase II, Wordstar 3.3, Peach Tree accounts and business applications and Superfile database and CP/M versions of Hisoft Pascal, Modula 2, Z80 Assembler and text editor.

[edit] The end

Tradecom purchased Grundy Business Systems in 1983 in order to fulfill a contract to supply microcomputers to schools and training centres in Holland. Although Tradecom claimed that they would push the NewBrain, continue its development, and ensure that it would have a future, in practice they did little of this. 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. Students who struggled to get 30 words per minute on a normal typewriter where achieving over 300 words per minute using these keyboards. They were given television coverage, but the NewBrain's part in this was not mentioned.

The NewBrain faded rapidly, with no new machines built. Tradecom's NewBrains were supplied entirely by existing stock. A press release was made of a new factory in India to provide NewBrains to the Indian market and supply Europe, but nothing materialised.

[edit] What remains

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 most of the programs that were available for the NewBrain, and these can be run on the emulator.

[edit] Specifications

Pricing: 229.00 GBP (United Kingdom, 1980), 48,000.00 GRD (Greece, 1985)
Emphasis: Education, Portable computing, Programming, Small business
Timeline: Released: 1983
CPU type: Z80
CPU word length: 8 bits
CPU clock rate: 4 MHz
ROM Size: 24 KiB
RAM Size: 32 KiB
Maximum RAM Size: 2 MiB
Number of keys: 62
Keyboard and one-line VF display chip: COP400 MCU
Graphics modes: 256x256, 320x256, 512x256, 640x256x2
Text modes: 32x25, 32x30, 40x25, 40x30, 64x25, 64x30, 80x25x2, 80x30x2
Total number of colours: 2
I/O Ports: 2x Tape recorder, Composite video, Expansion, 2x RS-232 (software based), TV output

[edit] References

NBUG magazines Article in Micro Computer Mart by Gerald McMullon

[edit] External links

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