Grundy NewBrain

~ the last words ~

The NewBrain started at Sinclair Radionics in 1978, designed by Mike Wakefield with Basil Smith on the engineering, as a cheap machine to go at the Apple II. It was funded through the National Enterprise Board, which had taken control of Radionics in the second half of the seventies and eventually pushed Clive Sinclair out to do the ZX80 somewhere else. The project moved on to Newbury Laboratories in 1979 and the machine kept its name through every one of those handovers.

Around 1980 the BBC started work on its computer literacy project and needed a computer to attach the television series to. The corporation had been following the NewBrain closely enough that the specification it eventually wrote was written around the NewBrain's capabilities. Newbury was late. The uncommitted logic arrays were not ready, and the delays were probably caused by trying to hit the BBC's own requirements. Other manufacturers pushed for the thing to go out to tender, Acorn's Proton became the BBC Micro, and the machine the document had been drafted for was left with no launch customer and no reason for anyone to notice it.

The British Technology Group sold the design on to Grundy Business Systems, which had only just been formed, in november 1981. Machines reached buyers in july 1982: the model A at £199, the model AD at £229 with a 16-character vacuum fluorescent display built into the case so it could be used without a television. A Z80A at 4 MHz with 32K of RAM that could be expanded absurdly far, and text at up to 80 columns in two colors. It was a compact and rather clever piece of engineering that had been finished about two years too late to matter.

Losing a tender whose specification was written around your product is a particular kind of defeat, and it is not a historical curiosity. In Ankara it is a standing joke that you can read a public procurement document and work out which company's datasheet was open on the desk. What the NewBrain shows is the other half of that joke, which is that being pre-wired to win is worth nothing if you cannot ship on the day. Acorn did not beat Newbury on merit. It beat them on being finished.

~ the record ~

~ the tender ~

The counterfactual is uncomfortable to hold. Had Newbury delivered on schedule, the BBC Micro would have been a NewBrain, and the Computer Literacy Project would have run on a Z80 rather than a 6502. Acorn would not have had the volume or the money to put its next team on a new instruction set, and the ARM design that came out of that money would either not exist or would have arrived from somewhere else years later.

That is a large hinge to hang on a supplier being a few months behind on some logic arrays. It is also the ordinary way these things go. The contract went to the machine that was ready in the room, the way contracts do, and everything downstream of it followed.

~ what got buried with it ~

Grundy was in real trouble by 1983 and it was over inside that year, with the remaining stock liquidated. The NewBrain had sold over fifty thousand, which is not nothing, but they went to buyers who purchase in quantity rather than to families. Schools and pharmaceutical companies took them, and so, for reasons nobody has satisfactorily explained, did the central planning apparatus of Angola. It did better in the Netherlands than at home. The Dutch firm Tradecom bought what was left to fill a contract for training centers, and a plan to build them in India never happened.

The machine is remembered now mostly for being nearly the BBC Micro, which is a thin sort of afterlife. The more useful thing it left is a warning about the shape of the bet. Newbury spent four years building to a specification written for a customer it had not yet signed, and when that customer went elsewhere there was no other market waiting. Everything the NewBrain did well was in service of a contract it did not get.

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