MGT - The London / Cambridge / Swansea Days

Well, okay then. It was a gas. Bruce Gordon and Alan Miles were and are great guys.

The Day I met Bruce and Alan

I was an American adrift in the UK in my early 20's, and had been working for a scaffolding outfit called North London Scaffolding, owned by Paddy McHugh; hard name to forget. A fellow named Jack Dugan taught me how to scaffold the British way. I was more or less his apprentice. It was fun work. Hard. Dirty. Extremely interesting. Jack was a craftsman and a good teacher. I liked it a lot. One day we did a scaffold near this satellite shop and they had a Help Wanted sign in the window. Home satellite technology was literally brand new at that time and I was intrigued by it. The place was a North London shop front, maybe 20 feet wide and 40 feet deep. It had a glass front and a single glass door. This was the era of dot matrix printed signs on fan fold paper with sprocket holes down the sides.

Inside, satellite dishes and control boxes were on display, lining the store down each side with a wide aisle in the center. On the right, up front where you could see it through the windows, there was something not-satellite; there was a little black TV with a home computer hooked up to it and next to that, an external floppy drive. How unusual. I had never seen an external floppy drive connected to one of those "home" computers, just cassette decks. Computers had been fascinating me since 1980 or so when my father bought an Apple II to use for bookkeeping so I was familiar with floppies, but this was new. I was more interested in that little Z80 rig than in any of the satellite stuff. At the rear were stairs to the second floor that wound around a corner and out of site, ascending. I think there was also a little office at the back near the stairs. I asked about the job.

They hired me to help sell satellites and also this little gadget that was connecting the floppy drive. I was introduced Bruce and Alan upstairs where they worked out of a little office by the stairs, more of a spacious nook than a bonified office. It did have a window, maybe two; it could very well have been a sort of corner space. At any rate, the floor was covered in boxes. There were a couple of chairs and I want to say, a longish desk along one wall near the door, where Alan and Bruce worked. Alan's end of the desk was all papers and computer magazines and Bruce's end was an oscilloscope, small boxes full of components, an overflowing ashtray, scattered PC boards, and a soldering iron with a tiny curl of smoke coming off the tip. Printer in the middle. They had stacks of these interfaces which were in the process of being finished and tested by Bruce and boxed up by Alan. The actual manufacture was done elsewhere, but they were not completely ready to ship when they came from the factory. There was also the occasional problem unit that a customer sent back for repair. Bruce was working on those, soldering iron in one hand, maybe a tiny capacitor in the other, maybe a voltage regulator, lit cigarette burning down in an ashtray next to him. "It's called the DISCiPLE," he told me when we introduced, "and it's magic."

Rockfort Products

The satellite shop had a name; it was called Rockfort Products. The owner was a scrappy little guy named Vishy H. and he was a snake. If Alan weighs in on this, he probably won't say anything bad about Vishy and that is because he is more of a gentleman than I. I do not know all the ins and outs of Bruce and Alan's relationship with Rockfort Products because it was not my place to be involved but I can say Vishy ultimately drove the nacent MGT away. His second in command was a fine fellow named Bharat D. who seemed to do a lot of apologizing for Vishy but was also his enforcer. It was, after all, Vishy's business. There was also another guy working there in approximately the same capacity as I. His name is long forgotten now. It was our job to sell satellite systems to whoever walked in. Dish tech was new and fresh back then and quite a lot of people came into the shop in a state of curiosity. The Spectrum and DISCiPLE always caught their attention, too, but it was usually sort of a passing thing, since they came in for the dish stuff. Me and that other dude sold quite a few systems. But when they came in specifically for the DISCiPLE, well, game on. Those were the best and most interesting customers. The vast majority of users bought their DISCiPLE via mailorder but we sold quite a few Disciple's to walk-ins. Most of them would also buy a disc drive, and I think we sold printers, too. Also a lot blank diskettes, printer paper, and cables went out the door. Rockfort was running advertisements for the DISCiPLE and the customers that could, came into the store. A lot of what Bruce and Alan were doing was satisfying the returns but they (mostly Alan) had no problem talking to walk-in customers directly. Quite a few people back then got their DISCiPLE straight from Alan or Bruce's hands.

The big sales occurred at computer shows, like the ZX Microfair. There was only three or four different shows, as I recall. May have been more; I don't think so. We would load up a little rental van and go to the show. We always had a little booth, maybe 10 feet wide, and we would set up a couple of Spectrum rigs with DISCiPLEs and external drives attached. These were Shugart compatible drives. The SA400 was sort of the defacto standard back then. If I recall correctly, there were also RLL encoded drives and eventually the IDE interface started getting popular. But we were selling Shugarts. Everyone who purchased a DISCiPLE would, of course, need a disc drive to go with. We sold a lot of disc drives at those shows. For one show I got a line on a few dozen new-in-box Sinclair 48K Spectrums. We sold some of those. Lots of Spectrum luminaries were at the shows, too. I remember one show Andy Wright was selling his BASIC and he had this simple but very effective demo of several black rings in rotation around a green bar such that they rings passed behind the green bar. Easy today; mystical 40 years ago. It might have been a blue bar. The demo was using memory swaps to animate the rings and it ran fast enough on a Z80 to be convincing. Bruce said at the time, It was around this time that I met Bob Brenchley who ran INDUG - the Independent DISCiPLE User's Group. He published a little quarto-sized black and white magazine/pamphlet sort of publication called Format. I think Simon Goodwin was hanging around at the shows too. The shows were always a long, hectic, and utterly wonderful time. Hewson and Kempston were always there. They were kind of the big dogs at the show (although in a couple of years, MGT would somewhat dominate). The DISCiPLE always impressed people - the external drive always piqued their interest, and the snapshot button made them loose their minds. It was fun. The number of people, attendees and exhibitors alike, who came by our booth to see for themselves was pretty high; it was definitely a thing at these shows to socialize and knit the community. The Horticultural Hall became, for a few days during those shows, the center of the universe. I can not remember a single other venue as well as I do the Hall. I know they existed, I just don't remember them.

Nor do I remember the details of the Rockfort Products / MGT breakup, but it was a little bitter. I think, and this is 50% conjecture, 50% faulty memory (so, perhaps, 100% bullshit) Vishy was not reaping the profits he anticipated and, on their side, Alan and Bruce felt they were being taken advantage of; two side of the same coin. I am certain there was also a sense that the quality control problems the DISCiPLE was experiencing could be better remedied if they were closer. So the Boys lit out for Cambridge. I now had nothing interesting to do. I stayed in touch. After a week or so they invited me up to Cambridge to see how things were going. 

Bruce and Alan had secured a work space in a small corner of the also small factory that made the DISCiPLEs, right next to the flow-solder machine used for the DISCiPLE pc boards. The factory made other things as well. I believe that they also operated a fullfillment service to satisfy mail-order sales. If you bought a DISCiPLE during this time, they would have built it, boxed it, and sent it to you. They had no QC to speak of, hence, the boxes of non-functional returned DISCiPLEs Bruce was working through in London when I first met he and Alan. Being now literally right next to the production line, Bruce was able to spot test production units before they went out to customers and that would make a difference. There were plans afoot to sell disk drives and other accessories as well. Alan was confident, rightly so, that everyone who had a Spectrum using a cassette drive was a potential DISCiPLE buyer and that every DISCiPLE buyer would also need a disc drive, cables, and other accessories. MGT was born. I took the train up to Cambridge hoping they would offer me a job and a couple days later I took the train back to London ecstatic that they had.

js

In paragraph 2, I mention that Bruce said athe tme... in context with Dr. Wright's BASIC at the show, and I skipped the rest of that sentence. What Bruce said at the time was something to Alan along the lines of "That's our guy." The SAM breadbord was at that time in it's very early stages of build. I think Bruce was just getting into writiing the ROM at that point in time. Not certain.

js