Miles Gordon Technology
Encyclopedia
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
company, initially specialising in high-quality add-ons for the Sinclair
Sinclair Research Ltd
Sinclair Research Ltd is a British consumer electronics company founded by Sir Clive Sinclair in Cambridge. Originally incorporated in 1973 as Ablesdeal Ltd., it remained dormant until 1976, and did not adopt the name Sinclair Research until 1981....
ZX Spectrum
ZX Spectrum
The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd...
home computer
Home computer
Home computers were a class of microcomputers entering the market in 1977, and becoming increasingly common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user...
. It was named for its founders, Alan Miles
Alan Miles
Alan Miles worked for Sinclair Research as a Mid-East Manager before going on to found Miles Gordon Technology with fellow ex-Sinclair colleague Bruce Gordon....
and Bruce Gordon and was founded in Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
in June 1986, by the two ex-Sinclair Research employees after Sinclair sold the rights for the Spectrum to Amstrad
Amstrad
Amstrad is a British electronics company, now wholly owned by BSkyB. As of 2006, Amstrad's main business is manufacturing Sky Digital interactive boxes....
. In May they moved to Swansea
Swansea
Swansea is a coastal city and county in Wales. Swansea is in the historic county boundaries of Glamorgan. Situated on the sandy South West Wales coast, the county area includes the Gower Peninsula and the Lliw uplands...
, Wales
Wales
Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...
, became a public company
Public company
This is not the same as a Government-owned corporation.A public company or publicly traded company is a limited liability company that offers its securities for sale to the general public, typically through a stock exchange, or through market makers operating in over the counter markets...
in July 1989 and went into receivership
Receivership
In law, receivership is the situation in which an institution or enterprise is being held by a receiver, a person "placed in the custodial responsibility for the property of others, including tangible and intangible assets and rights." The receivership remedy is an equitable remedy that emerged in...
in June 1990.
The DISCiPLE and +D
As the ZX Spectrum became hugely popular, the lack of a mass storageMass storage
In computing, mass storage refers to the storage of large amounts of data in a persisting and machine-readable fashion. Devices and/or systems that have been described as mass storage include tape libraries, RAID systems, hard disk drives, magnetic tape drives, optical disc drives, magneto-optical...
system became a problem for more serious users and while Sinclair's response, the ZX Interface 1
ZX Interface 1
A peripheral from Sinclair Research for its ZX Spectrum home computer, the ZX Interface 1 was launched in 1983. Originally intended as a local area network interface for use in school classrooms, it was revised before launch to also act as the controller for up to eight ZX Microdrive high-speed...
and ZX Microdrive
ZX Microdrive
The ZX Microdrive is a magnetic tape data storage system launched in July 1983 by Sinclair Research for their ZX Spectrum home computer. The Microdrive technology was later also used in the Sinclair QL and ICL One Per Desk personal computers.-Development:...
, while very cheap and technologically innovative, was also rather limited. Many companies developed interfaces to connect floppy disk
Floppy disk
A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier lined with fabric that removes dust particles...
drives to the ZX Spectrum, one of the most successful being the Opus Discovery, however these were all to some degree incompatible with Sinclair's system.
MGT's approach was different. It produced two different floppy-disk interfaces for the Spectrum, first the DISCiPLE
DISCiPLE
The DISCiPLE was a floppy disk interface for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer. Designed by Miles Gordon Technology, it was marketed by Rockfort Products and launched in 1986....
(marketed by Rockfort Products) and later the cut-down +D
+D
The +D was a floppy disk and printer interface for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer, developed as a successor to Miles Gordon Technology's earlier product, the DISCiPLE...
interface (marketed by MGT themselves). Both, however, shared certain features:
- A ShugartShugartShugart is the de facto standard for floppy disk drive interfaces created by Shugart Associates.* 50 pin: 8"* 34 pin: 5¼", 3½", 3""Shugart" may also refer to the company Shugart Associates, the founder of Shugart Associates, Alan Shugart, or political scientist Matthew Søberg Shugart....
-compatibleCompatibilityCompatibility may refer to:* Astrological compatibility* Compatibilism – a philosophical position* Compatibility * Compatibility * Compatibility * Electromagnetic compatibility* Interpersonal compatibility-Computing:...
port for connecting one or two floppy diskette drives (the de facto standard created by Shugart AssociatesShugart AssociatesShugart Associates was a computer peripheral manufacturer that dominated the floppy disk drive market in the late 1970s and is famous for introducing the 5¼-inch minifloppy disk drive....
) - A parallelParallel portA parallel port is a type of interface found on computers for connecting various peripherals. In computing, a parallel port is a parallel communication physical interface. It is also known as a printer port or Centronics port...
printerComputer printerIn computing, a printer is a peripheral which produces a text or graphics of documents stored in electronic form, usually on physical print media such as paper or transparencies. Many printers are primarily used as local peripherals, and are attached by a printer cable or, in most new printers, a...
port - A "magic button"
The latter generated a non-maskable interrupt
Non-Maskable interrupt
A non-maskable interrupt is a computer processor interrupt that cannot be ignored by standard interrupt masking techniques in the system. It is typically used to signal attention for non-recoverable hardware errors...
, freezing any software running on the Spectrum and allowing it to be saved to disk. This made it simple to store tape-based games on disk, to take screenshot
Screenshot
A screenshot , screen capture , screen dump, screengrab , or print screen is an image taken by a computer to record the visible items displayed on the monitor, television, or another visual output device...
s and to enter cheat codes. A duplicate expansion connector at the back allowed other peripheral
Peripheral
A peripheral is a device attached to a host computer, but not part of it, and is more or less dependent on the host. It expands the host's capabilities, but does not form part of the core computer architecture....
s to be daisy chain
Daisy chain
Daisy chain may refer to a daisy garland created from daisy flowers, the original meaning and the one from which the following derive by analogy:*Daisy chain *Daisy chain *Daisy chain...
ed, although the complexity of the DISCiPLE meant that many would not work correctly.
However, the real innovation was in the ROM
Read-only memory
Read-only memory is a class of storage medium used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM cannot be modified, or can be modified only slowly or with difficulty, so it is mainly used to distribute firmware .In its strictest sense, ROM refers only...
. Unlike most of the competing systems, this was compatible with the Sinclair's extended ROM, meaning that the same BASIC commands used to operate Microdrives or the ZX Printer
ZX Printer
The Sinclair ZX Printer is a spark printer which was produced by Sinclair Research for its ZX81 home computer. It was launched in 1981, with a recommended retail price of £49.95....
now could control floppy disk drives or a standard parallel printer. As well as being BASIC-compatible, though, it also mimicked the machine code
Machine code
Machine code or machine language is a system of impartible instructions executed directly by a computer's central processing unit. Each instruction performs a very specific task, typically either an operation on a unit of data Machine code or machine language is a system of impartible instructions...
entry points in the ZX Interface 1 - the so-called "hook codes". This meant that any Microdrive-specific software could use floppy disk drives connected to MGT interfaces instead, without modification provided the hook codes were used. The floppy drives simply appeared to Microdrive-aware applications to be very big, fast Microdrives.
Sinclair's Microdrive command syntax was so complex that a selling point of many disk interfaces was that their commands were simpler. While loading from tape required a simple:
LOAD "progname"
the equivalent Microdrive syntax was:
LOAD *"m";1;"progname"
Given the complexity of entering punctuation on the Spectrum's tiny keyboard, this was cumbersome. In addition to supporting the Sinclair syntax, MGT's code reduced the command to:
LOAD d1"progname"
Later, MGT produced the Lifetime Drive range of floppy disk drives (later named Universal Drive after concerns about warranty expectations). The drive was advertised as being compatible with major systems on the market at the time and comprised four models (3.5" and 5.25", with and without their own power supplies). Compatibility with various machines was achieved using a DIP switch and computer-specific cables.
The SAM Coupé
MGT started working their own home computerHome computer
Home computers were a class of microcomputers entering the market in 1977, and becoming increasingly common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user...
, the SAM Coupé
SAM Coupé
The SAM Coupé is an 8-bit British home computer that was first released in late 1989. It is commonly considered a clone of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer, since it features a compatible screen mode and emulated compatibility, and it was marketed as a logical upgrade from the Spectrum...
, early on, while profits from MGT's other product financed its development. The SAM was essentially a ZX Spectrum 48K-compatible system with enhanced graphics and sound, more interfaces, expanded memory and a new BASIC
BASIC
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....
interpreter. The machine was eventually launched late in 1989. Unfortunately, while technically advanced, it arrived too late to establish a market and resulted in the company's demise. The rights to the +D interface were sold to Datel Electronics Limited
Datel
Datel is a UK-based electronics and game console peripherals manufacturer. The company is best known for producing a wide range of hardware and peripherals for home computers in the 1980s, for example replacement keyboards for the ZX Spectrum, the PlusD disk interface and the Action Replay series...
in an effort to finance the SAM Coupé. Alan Miles and Bruce Gordon bought the assets of MGT to form Sam Computers. However that was a temporary repreive and thhat company also ceased in 1992.