The sudden demise of Dragon Data unfortunately coincided with the companies entry into the business market. However, Liz Coley feels the Dragon Professional may be just the thing to get the company back on it's feet.
After months of speculation
we all shook our heads as Dragon Data entered the hands of the receiver on 31
May 1984. At the same time the 3 1/2 disk drive, modem and OS9-equipped GEC
Dragon Professional appeared for review at a suggested price of £699,
with a single disk drive and £849 with double disk drives (incl VAT).
The '64 repackaged for business' flavour of the machine illustrates the dogged
refusal of this Dragon to lie down despite a series of PR and marketing hashes
that destroyed most of the companies credibility as a manufacturer of home computers.
Rise
and Fall
Dragon Data commenced trading at the end of 1981 as an attempt by Swansea's
Mettoy Ltd to grab a share of the rapidly expanding home computer market. To
this end the Dragon 32 took shape as a low-cost alternative to the Tandy TRS-80
Color Computer, complete with the same Motorola 6809 microprocessor, 16K Microsoft
Extended Color Basic and 32Kof user RAM. This, coupled with a recommended retail
price of £199 - the same as the 3.5K equipped VIC at the time and £150
less than the Tandy - promised a bright future when the 32 was announced in
August1982.
Initial high demand stretched the manufacturing and cash resources of Mettoy
to the limit. By October 1982 most of Dragon Data had been sold off.
The new company seemed a viable proposition, but a curious lack of PR know-how
put the focus on Mettoy's now irrelevant problems and gossip, fuelled by competitors,
caused confidence in Dragon to nose-dive.
September 1983 saw the launch of the 64 plus175k single and double disk drives
at the PCW show, coinciding with a further £4 million cash boost from
shareholders - which again highlighted Dragon's difficulties. The 64 was received
with muted enthusiasm and, a month later, Mettoy showed incredibly bad timing
by folding.
Although Mettoy's financial interest in Dragon Data was a scant 18%, the memory
of Dragon beginnings was fresh in the minds of all concerned. Limited development
and frenzied but ineffectual marketing continued until February 1984 when another
of the Prudential's heavy investments, GEC, was called in to oversee sales and
marketing and to lend its respected name to prop up the now mistrusted Dragon
logo. Freed of marketing responsibilities, hardcore Dragon people concentrated
efforts on development, working to extend the GEC Dragon catalogue to include
low-cost, self- contained business systems, such as the Professional, in an
attempt to improve credibility but, it appears, too late and too expensive.
GEC Dragon ceased trading on the point of launch.
Hardware
The Dragon Professional is, essentially: a Dragon 64 PCB redesigned to make room
for the modem, disk controller and disk expansion port, additional diagnostic
ROMS and a composite video output.
Along with this come one or two 500k (340k formatted), 31/2in Sony disk drives,
an efficient switched mode power supply and a 1200 Baud Prestel 1/600 Baud machine
link modem.
Everything comes in a standard Dragon bottom case with a restyled top cover that
continues the slope of the rickety Dragon keyboard to the rear of the machine
to form a wedge, increasing rear headroom in the process. Immediately above the
keyboard on the left side are two minute LEDS; red power-on to the left and a
green one to the right connected with modem operation.
The now familiar Sony micro floppy drives and the power supply are contained in
a second wedge above the LEDS, with extra ventilation slots along the top. Drive
door 0 emerges on the far right of the front panel. Drive I (if fitted) sits on
its left next to a new GEC Dragon 'The Professional' logo, complete with green
and blue 'go-faster' stripes. Each drive door panel sports a disk-eject button
to the right and a red disk-in-use LED to the left and is finished in a light
grey that enhances the visual effect of the otherwise mid grey livery.
The connectors fitted round the edge of the bottom case follow standard Dragon
layout with a few changes. To the right is the expected cartridge connector. The
left-hand side has the same line-up as the 64 with the exception of a one metre
modem lead, fitted with a swish British Telecom 'phone plug, in place of one of
the joystick ports.
This leaves TV output, reset button, modem lead, RS232 port, joystick port, tape
connector and parallel Centronics printer port. Major surgery on the rear replaces
the 'D' type transformer connector and push-button on/off switch with a one-piece
mains supply panel consisting of a 3-pin Euro mains connector and a robust rocker
switch.
Looking from the rear, the monitor socket remains to the right of the supply panel
but gains two pins to provide RGB and composite video in the same cable. On the
far left a new disk expansion connector allows the Professional to control up
to two additional Dragon drives.
Removing four screws, one in each corner on the underside, frees the top case.
There's an awful lot packed in there! As in the rest of the Dragon range, the
keyboard lies across the front of the PCB attached by four screws. A two inch
gap al lows access to the 6809 - with the rest of the PCB covered by a very solid
cast aluminium frame fitted across the case providing a mounting for the closely-packed,
fibre- board covered drives (on the twin drive review model) and power supply.
This doubles as a massive heat sink in an attempt to disperse the excessive heat
generated by the drives and, more importantly, the power supply. Massive though
it is, the heat sink should have the aid of a cooling fan to keep this crowded
environment cool, but more of that later. Sensibly, the drives are fitted with
long ribbon cables so that releasing four easily accessed screws allows the frame
to be swivelled backwards away from the case by simple removal of the PCB power
connector. The rear half of the board is now open to scrutiny.
In the new layout the eight 4864 RAM chips from the 64 now extend under the keyboard
from the right of the socket mounted 6809. Other socketed chips include the 6847
video display controller, 6883 SAM synchronous address multiplexer and the 8346
disk controller, as fitted in the Dragon disk interface cartridge, mounted directly
beneath drive 0. Modem components are soldered directly into the board, adjacent
to the cable outlet. The extensively reworked PCB layout seems relatively free
from gross, hardwired after- thoughts, although there are two small, neatly fitted
PCBs soldered proud of the board, possibly due to putting quarts in pint pots!
In Use
The review model supplied was highly temperamental in that it played ball for
a short time, usually about an hour, randomly refused to obey commands and pretended
that some files on disk didn't exist. This got rapidly and progressively worse
until the machine gave up completely, requiring several hours to recover. Dragon
personnel, when questioned, didn't seem at all surprised at this phenomenon
and a second Professional was provided which soon suffered the identical problem.
Judging by the amount of heat transferred to the plastic case and, more alarmingly,
to microfloppies within drives, the massive heat sink is definitely not enough
to prevent heat from affecting operations. As an aside, interesting hang-ups
could be obtained on both machines by pressing lightly on the case above the
power supply. I persisted with the machine, on and off, over two days of these
problems but tests of the supplied software were, of necessity, patchy and sketchy
(a new ad agency?) as a consequence.
On power-up the Professional assumes 51-column monochrome mode. This is actually
the 256x192, high resolution Dragon graphic mode 4, using simplified characters
for standard text.
However, Dragon has taken the trouble to produce an attractive system boot menu
that includes the Professional logo. Options given are 'B' to access the built-in
Microsoft Basic and 'D' to boot a system disk in drive 0, in this case OS9.
'B' selects a 32k Dragon configuration complete with Microsoft copyright banner
and lurid green screen. Curiously, EXEC (ENTER), the normal method of claiming
the extra 32k of RAM, returns a syntax error. Also, Dragon DOS is not supplied
so DOS commands have no effect from Basic and alternative routines were not
apparent.
Software
Selecting 'D' from power-u p scrolls the display, resulting in the appearance
of a delightful Sony drive and microfloppy graphic, inviting the insertion of
the system disk. The 'shell' of essential OS9 control routines takes about 20
seconds to load. On completion a1980 Motorola and Microwave copyright banner
appears with an invitation to 'log on'. The'OS9': prompt follows. On completion
of a task the prompt reappears to remind you that you're still in OS9.
OS9 was developed by Microware as a Unix equivalent for the 6809, specifically
to support compiled Basic 09. Although OS9 requires 96k of code, only the shell
is held permanently in memory acting as the middle man, calling command routines
from the remaining 80k on the system disk as required. This is possible because
the 6809 uses position-independent code, or PIC, that can be loaded into, and
run from, any point in memory. This makes memory management very efficient and
enables several separate programs and routines to be stored at once.
In addition, files are stored on disk land, in a limited fashion, in memory)
in a multi-level directory file system configured as a 'tree' structure where
the main (or root) directory of a disk contains filenames that can refer to
files of directories to other files, and so on, though any file can be called
directly by name, however far up the tree its directory is. Another important
feature is that OS9 supports, and the 6809 is capable of, some background processing,
enabling limited multi-tasking.
All three business packages supplied with the Professional are contained on
separate disks and depend on OS9 to operate- These were reviewed on the 64 in
the June 1984 issue of PCW but it's worth noting in passing that Stylo- graph
suffers badly from the 51-column screen and makeshift characters. It's almost
impossible to use on a standard TV.
The review machine was not supplied with software to drive the modem or any
further indications of modem performance, therefore its function can not be
assessed. Dragon has further OS9 packages available, at extra cost, such as
the compiled Basic 09, a 'C' compiler, Pascal, Cash & VAT bookkeeper, Stock
Recorder and an Editor/Assembler/ Debugger; all at less than £80 per package.
Documentation
No specific Professional manuals were supplied; but if they match the standard
of the readable and thorough, 64- orientated software manuals they will be adequate
for all but the most demanding user.
All the software manuals abandon rear indexes in favour of detailed Tables of
Contents at the front, refer- ring to clear paragraph headings by page number.
I found this extremely convenient for finding particular command routines. I
also liked the use of coloured pages for sections that refer to separate modules
on the same disk.
Conclusion
The Professional certainly offers convenience, and better value than a fully
equipped Dragon 64. Broadly:
... If Dragon recommences trading
... If the quoted prices are realistic
... If the cooling problems are over- come
and ... If a new incarnation of Dragon can regain lost credibility
... then even counting the QL the Dragon Professional would be hard to beat
for small businesses.
Given suitable mouse and icon-driven software, eminently feasible with OS9,
it would fulfil Dragon's promise of a self-contained, easy to use system at
low cost, and clean up ! If not. .. Nothing.
END