Dragon Data

~ the last words ~

A toy company built it. Mettoy had been making Corgi die-cast cars since the 1950s, and in 1982 it decided that the British home computer boom was somewhere a toy manufacturer belonged. Dragon Data was set up to do the building, first in Swansea and then at a plant at Kenfig near Port Talbot, in a corner of Wales where the steelworks had recently shed thousands of jobs and any employer arriving with a factory was going to find the public sector helpful.

Mettoy was already in financial trouble and could not carry the thing it had started. Dragon Data was spun out as a separate business and the money came from elsewhere: Prutec, Prudential's technology investment arm, took 41 percent, with Hill Samuel and the Welsh Development Agency alongside and Mettoy holding around 20 percent. GEC came in later, installed its own chief executive, and by one contemporary account wanted nothing further to do with the place.

The product story belongs on the Dragon 32/64 stone and the failures there were real. The corporate shape of it is a separate thing. Here was a computer manufacturer owned by a toymaker and then refinanced by an insurance company's venture arm, sited where it was because of regional development money. Nobody in that ownership structure was a computer person, and the company's decisions read that way from the outside.

Everything shipped late. The disk drives were late and OS-9 was later still, and the successor machines never turned up in a state anyone wanted to buy. The receiver was called in during June 1984, under two years after the Dragon 32 had gone on sale.

~ the record ~

~ the emptied factory ~

What Eurohard bought in 1984 was not a going concern. For just over a million pounds the Spanish startup took the patent rights and the entire contents of the plant, down to the test equipment and the work in progress, and shipped all of it to Cáceres in Extremadura. The building at Kenfig was left standing and empty. There were also thousands of unsold Dragons in stock somewhere with an estimated retail value between four and six million pounds.

In Spain the operation ran for a while. Eurohard got to 500 units a day at Cáceres and priced the machines slightly under the local competition. Between November 1984 and October 1985 it sold 17,000 Dragons and gave away another 20,000 to schools and institutes, which tells you which half of the plan was functioning. It put out the Dragon 200, a rebadged Dragon 64, and then went into receivership itself.

~ 1984 ~

Dragon Data went to the receiver in 1984, which is the year I was born. Britain's home computer boom, the one where the weekend papers ran comparison tables of which machine had which processor, had run its whole arc before I could read, and it never took place here in any recognizable form. The machines that got into Turkish houses arrived years afterward and usually secondhand, mostly Spectrums and Commodores brought in by importers, and no Dragon was ever among them.

There is no Turkish memory of this company to lose. That is the point of writing it down: forty thousand units, a purpose-built factory, three institutional investors and a toy company, all of it finished inside twenty four months, in a country where it was genuinely famous for about a year.

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