Camputers Lynx

~ the goodbye ~

Richard Greenwood set up the company in february 1981, under the name Camtronic Circuits, out of an electronics design practice he was already running. It became Camputers, in Cambridge, at the exact moment and in the exact town where a British electronics engineer with a good idea could reasonably believe he was about to become Clive Sinclair. The Lynx was shown at the Personal Computer World Show in september 1982 and started shipping that december, though it did not reach shops properly until march 1983.

It was a better machine than most of what it sat beside. The 48K model launched at 225 pounds after being announced at 150, and the range grew upward rather than downward: a 96K version in september 1983, and a 128K version in march 1984 that ran CP/M. That is a home computer following a business computer's roadmap, adding memory and a serious operating system, aiming at the person who wanted to write software rather than load it. Camputers projected 40,000 units for 1983 alone.

It sold about 30,000 across its entire life, and only a third of those went to British buyers, with the rest going into Europe. Christmas 1983 was the test and the Lynx failed it, which in the British micro market of that year was the only test there was. The company looked for more funding, did not find it, and called a creditors meeting in june 1984. Geoff Sore, who was there, put the diagnosis in one sentence afterwards: they had failed to appreciate the power of the games market. Anston Technology bought the assets and the Lynx name that december for 24,000 pounds and announced a relaunch of the 128K at 299 pounds in february 1985, without ever meaningfully getting the machine back onto a shelf.

Nothing Camputers built reached Turkey, and by the time I had a machine of my own at home in 1998 the entire British micro industry had been finished for a decade. The figure that stays with me is the pair at the end: 1.8 million pounds owed, and 94,250 pounds of assets in the room. That is roughly what a hardware company is worth on the day it stops, because the value was sitting in tooling for a product nobody wants and in stock nobody will take at any price. Anston paid 24,000 pounds for the remains six months later. Software companies do not die in this shape. When they fail there is usually at least a codebase somebody can still run.

~ the chronicle ~

~ three names for one computer ~

Camputers renamed the range partway through. The 48K machine became the Leisure and the larger models became the Laureate, which was an attempt to say out loud what the company had been quietly assuming: that there were two customers here, one buying a toy and one buying a tool. Splitting the branding of a range that had sold 30,000 units in total was not the highest-leverage thing available.

The hardware itself was a Z80 with a genuinely good display for the money, and the machine had a reputation among the people who owned one for being pleasant to program. That is a real thing and it is also the thing that sells the fewest units, because the number of people who choose a home computer on the quality of its BASIC is always smaller than the number who choose it on what is in the shop window.

~ the wrong customer ~

The Lynx arrived into the same eighteen months as the Commodore 64 and the Spectrum's peak, along with a dozen British machines that all died. What separated the survivors was games, and Camputers had built for somebody else. By 1983 the question a British parent was actually asking in a shop was which box had the software their child wanted, and no amount of CP/M compatibility answered it.

Two thirds of the sales going abroad is the other half of the story and it usually gets read as a bright spot. It is not. Selling into Europe through distributors, from Cambridge, in 1983, meant thin margins and no control over how the machine was presented, and it meant the company's actual customer base was somewhere it could not see.

~ what anston bought ~

Twenty four thousand pounds bought the tooling and the remaining stock, along with the rights and the name of a computer that had been on sale eighteen months and had 30,000 owners. Anston announced in february 1985 that the 128K would come back at 299 pounds with a one megabyte disk drive at 269, and there is no real evidence the revived machine ever returned to the market in any quantity.

The Lynx has a small preservation scene now, with emulators and disk images kept alive by the people who owned one. That is the usual afterlife for a British micro of this generation and it is not nothing. Thirty thousand machines is enough people to remember something, and it was never anywhere close to enough to keep the company that made them alive.

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