"Sold, if I’m not mistaken, close to 200 Dragons. Which, for Malta is a lot."

"It was made very, very difficult to import computers as a business to resell, to the extent that every computer imported had to have a personal import license made out to the person who was actually going to buy the computer."

"Eurohard worked on Madrid time, which meant that you were eating at who knows what time, and there was a very laid-back attitude to appointments."

David Farrugia
Dragon retailer in Malta

Find out more about his adventures with the Dragon, in the Q&A

I had an interview at the Dragon Data plant in Margam, shortly before the company departed this earth.
I did the 10 cent tour and was taken to the board room, whereupon it got a bit difficult to walk. This was due to the depth & luxury of the carpeting.
Pulling a chair away from the table to sit down was almost as difficult, since it seemed to weigh about a hundred pounds, with a very comfortable seat. Nice table, too. Sort of 20 yards long & nicely polished. The contrast with the rest of the "tin shed" was startling, and it crossed my mind that a lot of money had been spent in places that did nothing to make, design or sell computers or bring income into the company.

I was proved correct very soon after. At the time, Dragon data were just introducing disk drive interfaces for the 32 and 64.
I was asked if I knew anything about floppy disk interfaces, but at that time I didn't.

As far as I recall they were offering about £7k5 at the time, which was roughly comparable with what I was earning at Siliconix.

"The tin" shed has been producing Orion brand videos & tvs since about 1987.

John Young

"Just to say I love your website, someone finally saying something nice about the dragon for a change.

The 32 was my first computer many years ago when I was 11, funnily enough when the machine was in it's twilight years but still preferred it at the time to the spectrums, vic-20 etc.

I live about 15 miles from where the Dragon's were made on the Margan Industrial estate. My father worked for Borg Warner and the Dragon factory was literally next door so I would see it almost on a daily basis as it is visible from the M4 just past the first windsock on the Way to Port Talbot. After being empty for a while when Dragon Data finally disappeared to Spain, the same factory was (and still is I think) owned by the "ORION" electronics company.

I accumulated almost any software that i could find as it became more and more scarce, and visited probably the last ever Dragon computer show held at Cardiff Wales Airport in 1985, when GEC first took over production and saw the Dragon 200 for the first time and havent heard anything about it until I saw your site. I though I was dreaming or something at the time.

I eventually traded the Dragon in 1986 for a spectrum 48k and immediately wished I hadn't. I have a collection of retro computers now and still fire up the 32k occasionally with a large selection of games. Also had a 64 version but a collector paid me £100 for it without a box so I snapped it up. The 32 was virgin terretory years ago and I've also got a ltd edition customised Black version (If only Dragon had made them in black they maybe would have sold a lot more of them, haha), I sometimes prefer to use the T3 emulator when I cant be arsed to wait for loading. With the Mess emulator I've transferred a shed load of games onto sony Minidiscs for easy no fussing, 1st time, every time loading.

Keep up the good work."

Chris Poacher

My introduction to the world of IT started at the age of 10 on my birthday in 1982 when I unwrapped this huge white box that was covered in red dragon logos. Without that birthday present I would not have started down the career path I am now involved with, I would have been much happier swiming with dolphins. I have very fond memories of the Dragon 32, it provided much wonder as well as frustration.

Within my circle of friends at the time, a couple owned Sinclair Spectrum 48K machines and played games on them almost continiously. Myself and another friend were not content with just playing games, we wanted more and I started to learn BASIC. The Dragon 32 came with what must of been one of the best home computer manuals ever. I recall taking the Dragon 32 on holiday to the channel islands purely because I was in the middle of creating a clone of Moon Cresta and wouldn't put it down until I had the first couple of levels working.

I remember playing games for hours at the weekend, the excitement following the release of Manic Miner for the Dragon and going to 6809 shows in London with my parents. I recall at one point I had a control board interfaced to the printer port, you could control eight relays/LEDs by printing different characters. Today I work in the IT industry as a senior technical consultant, I am the custodian of the Dragon Archive and aim to preserve as much as possible about this great british machine. It may not have had the popularity of the Spectrum or Commodore 64, but it was a wonderful machine to program and great fun to own. Thanks Mum and Dad !

Just for completeness, following the Dragon I moved on to the Amstrad
CPC464, Amstrad CPC6128, Amiga 500, Amiga 4000....and I still have them all.

Simon Hardy

In October, 1982, I spent £199 on a Dragon 32, swayed by the advertisements for its "massive" 32k memory, and a keyboard guaranteed to survive two million keystrokes. I also bought a couple of pieces of software, written in Basic and saved on cassette tape. By the time I'd read the manual, I'd decided that I could do better. (That's a comment on the quality of the software, not on my ability.)

In common with many Basic programmers before me, my first effort was an appalling hangman game, for which I typed in a bank of 1,000 place names and 1,000 football topics. I had the nerve to advertise it for £5.45 in Popular Computing Weekly and sold a few copies. These were produced on the dining table with a Dragon and a cassette recorder, then labelled with typewritten stickers.

More....

Harry Whitehouse of Peaksoft