Dragon 32/64

~ the last words ~

Mettoy made Corgi die-cast cars in Swansea and was watching its market shrink. In 1982 it set up Dragon Data to build a home computer, and the Welsh Development Agency took 23 percent of the company on the argument that microcomputers were the industry that would replace the ones closing across south Wales. Part of the deal was a bigger factory, so production moved to Kenfig industrial estate near Port Talbot, a few miles from the steelworks.

The Dragon 32 went on sale in august 1982 at £199.50. Inside was a Motorola 6809, a genuinely well regarded processor, and a design close enough to the Tandy Color Computer that software crossed between them with small changes. The keyboard was full travel at a price where the competition was selling rubber and membrane, and for a lot of buyers that settled it. Forty thousand went out by april 1983, most of them into the Christmas before, and Dragon Data became for a moment the largest privately owned company in Wales.

Then the graphics caught up with it. The Motorola video chip drove a display with no lowercase characters in hardware text mode and a color palette that made every Dragon game look like a Dragon game, which mattered because the ZX Spectrum was cheaper and looked better on a television. Schools would not touch a machine that could not print a lowercase letter. The Dragon 64 arrived in 1983 with more memory and a working serial port and did not change anyone's mind. Dragon Data went into receivership in june 1984, less than two years after the launch, and Eurohard bought the assets and carried on building Dragons in Cáceres, Spain, until it went bankrupt in 1987.

The machine is not the part I can speak to. It was never sold in Turkey and I was an infant either way. The financing is the part that still reads as current. A regional development agency put public money into a computer company because computing looked like the industry that would replace the one closing down the road, and it did that in the town where the closing was happening. That argument has not aged out anywhere. I work in ankara in 2026 on hardware where the case for building it domestically gets made in almost the same sentences, and the Dragon is a useful reminder that an argument can be right at the level of a country and still not save any particular factory.

~ the record ~

~ what got buried with it ~

The 6809 deserved better than it got. It was the most capable eight-bit processor in wide production, with two index registers and instructions that made position-independent code straightforward, and OS-9 ran on it as a real multitasking operating system with a Unix shape. Dragon Data sold OS-9 for the 64 and almost nobody bought it, because the audience for a £199 machine in 1983 was not shopping for process scheduling.

What went with the receivership was the second machine. The Dragon Beta had been developed to take the line upmarket, with a second processor and proper disk support, and a handful of prototypes survive in collections. It never shipped. Companies that die at the wrong moment leave this behind more often than they leave anything else, which is a finished product nobody outside the building ever saw working.

~ the day it died ~

June 1984 was a bad month across the British home computer industry and Dragon was not the only casualty, but it was the one with a development agency's name on the shareholder register. The Kenfig plant was tooled for five thousand machines a week at a point when the sales had stopped, which is the usual way this ends. The receivers sold the design and the stock to Eurohard, a Spanish venture backed in part by regional money in Extremadura, and the whole story repeated at a smaller scale in a different country.

Eurohard shipped the Dragon 200 and then the Dragon 200-E with Spanish characters and accented vowels in the character ROM, which is a small detail that says more about the Spanish market than a page of analysis would. It lasted until 1987. The user group in Britain kept meeting for years after there was anything left to buy, and the software archive that came out of it is still online.

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