Memotech MTX

~ the eulogy ~

Memotech was founded in Witney in 1981 by Robert Branton, a mathematician, and Geoff Boyd, a metallurgist. The business was MemoPaks, the wobble-free RAM packs that plugged into the back of a ZX81, and it worked well enough that they had sold over a quarter of a million of them by 1984 and were running 110 staff. When it became obvious that Sinclair's next machine would not need an expansion pack industry behind it, they decided to build a computer of their own.

The MTX500 was shown at the Earl's Court Computer Fair in june 1983 at £275. Boyd's background is visible in the object: where every other British micro of the year came in injection-molded plastic, the MTX arrived in a black extruded aluminum case with a full-size mechanical keyboard, and it is still the reason people who owned one describe it before they describe what it did. Inside was a Z80A at 4 MHz with the same TMS9918 video chip the MSX standard used, though the two were not compatible. The MTX512 followed in early 1984 with 64K at £315, and the RS128 later that year at £399.

The specification was generous and the market did not care. The Spectrum was less than half the price and the BBC Micro already owned the schools, and neither of those gaps could be closed by having more memory than anybody needed. Sales were modest from the start, and 1984 was the year the British home computer trade stopped growing, so a machine designed during the boom went on sale into the contraction.

The MTX sold in Britain and then in a short list of northern european markets, and Turkey was not on any version of that list in a year when I was an infant, so what is left to me here is the mechanism rather than the machine. The part of it that is not a 1980s story is the parts bill. Boyd's own account is that Memotech bought its components at 1983 prices, when the whole trade expected another year like the last one, and by the time the machines were moving those components were an expensive pile in a warehouse. Anyone building hardware now signs the same paper. You commit to a bill of materials a year or more before a single customer exists, and what kills you is rarely the design. It is the distance between the day you pay for silicon and the day somebody pays you for a finished box, and that distance has not shortened since 1984.

~ the dossier ~

~ the russian order ~

By 1984 Memotech was working on something large enough to change the company's shape: supplying the MTX512 and its FDX disk unit to Soviet schools, on the order of 64,000 institutions and a potential two hundred thousand machines. The reason a British micro could be offered at all was a technicality. The USSR was under western export controls, but CP/M machines were not covered, and the MTX ran CP/M through the FDX. A Russian-language version was designed with a bright red case. The prospect was announced in april 1985.

Demonstrations in Moscow produced about £20,000 of actual sales. The order went to Yamaha's MSX machines for £2 million, on the grounds that Yamaha could meet the deadline. Memotech had already spent heavily on getting ready for a contract it did not have. Boyd has since said that blaming the Russians was convenient and not really true, and that the company had been killed a year earlier by the timing of its own launch.

~ weird science ~

The MTX512 and the FDX unit have one piece of publicity that outlived the company by decades. In Weird Science, released in the summer of 1985, the two teenagers use them to conjure Lisa, and the machine sits at the center of the plot for the length of the film. It was the widest audience an MTX ever had. Memotech went into receivership within weeks of the release.

~ what it became ~

September 1985 opened with a price cut to £79.95 for the MTX500 and £129.95 for the MTX512, which is the move a company makes when it has run out of others, and closed with the receiver. Boyd bought the assets back and relaunched as Memotech Computers in march 1986. The MTX512 Series 2 came out that year, built mostly to consume the remaining stock of parts, and that was the last MTX anybody made.

The company that came out the other side did fine. Memotech had built an HRX graphics system in 1984 at £4,500, aimed at nobody in the home market, and that turned into a video wall business selling to people who wanted large synchronized displays. Boyd later ended up at NXT licensing flat-panel speaker technology. The aluminum case survived in a way the computer inside it did not: the machines still turn up working, forty years on, because somebody built them out of metal in a year when everyone else was building them out of plastic.

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