The first IDE interface for the Coupé.

Originally designed by Ian Spencer from an article in the Spectrum und Sam Profi Club magazine by Roelof Koning.

Originally designed to run Search: “HDUTIL” to have a carosel of virtual disk images that could be loaded into a One Meg expansion as a virtual drive it was extended into Search: “HDUI” with support for loading, saving and directory navigation.

The design was offered to and productionised with a PCB by Nev Young.

This first release had bugs due to the missing out of an LS245 buffer chip causing unreliable operation, excess load on the SAM data lines and inconsisencies with timing.  This needed to be fixed with a recall and hardware modification.

Nev developed HDOS as a more native IDE solution although lack of integration with BASIC and the recall issued was a hurdle to user adoption along with the release of the ATOM.