The Nascom 1 and 2 were single-board computer kits issued in the United Kingdom in 1977 and 1979, respectively, based on the Zilog Z80 and including a keyboard and video interface, a serial port that could be used to store data on a tape cassette using a proprietary standard (tone for mark, no tone for space), and two 8-bit parallel ports. At that time, including a full keyboard and video display interface was uncommon, as most microcomputer kits were then delivered with only a hexadecimal keypad and seven-segment display. To minimize cost, the buyer had to assemble a Nascom by hand-soldering about 3,000 joints on the single circuit board. Later on, a pre-built, cased machine named Nascom 3 was available; this used the Nascom 2 board.
Model Nascom 1 Nascom 2 Introduced December 1977 December 1979 MSRP (price) £197.50 £295 CPU (μP) Zilog Z80 Zilog Z80A CPU speed 2 MHz 2 or 4 MHz (switch on main board) Monitor/OS* NAS-BUG 1 (1 KB EPROM) NAS-SYS 1, most were shipped with NAS-SYS 3 (2 KB ROM) RAM 2 KB (1 KB used for display), exp. to 64 KB 8 KB, exp. to 1 MB Dimensions 8" x 10" (main board) 8" x 12" (main board) Discontinued 1979 1983 * A debug monitor and simple operating system (OS) was included with the devices. CP/M versions 1.4, 2.2 and 3.0 were also available later.
History
The history of Nascom starts with the history of John A. Marshall. Marshall was the "& Son" of "A Marshall & Son (London) Ltd", an electronic component retailer whose adverts were a regular feature in hobby electronics magazines from as early as 1967.
Marshall was a director of a company called Nasco Sales Ltd; a UK distributor of US semiconductors. He was also connected with a company called Lynx Electronics (London) Ltd. which had been a regular advertiser in the hobby electronics press since 1976.
During a business trip to California in the Autumn of 1976, Marshall attended an amateur computer club meeting at Stanford University. On the flight home, he started to wonder whether there was a market in the UK for a kit computer. Marshall used the price of an SLR camera (about £200) as a reference point for the amount someone might be prepared to spend on a "hobby" purchase.
At the end of 1976, Marshall attended a microprocessor seminar at Imperial College and met Phil Pitman. Pitman was the marketing manager for Mostek, which had recently become a second source for Zilog's Z80 processor. Pitman put Marshall in touch with a design consultant named Chris Shelton and, in the spring of 1977, Marshall commissioned Shelton Instruments to design the Nascom 1.
Most of the details of the Nascom design were described in a series of articles by Pitman that appeared in Wireless World between November 1977 and January 1979.
By July 1977, monthly magazine adverts by Lynx Electronics were starting to hint about a microprocessor seminar in the autumn and a forthcoming computer product.
On Saturday, 26 November 1977, Lynx Electronics launched the Nascom 1 at their "Home Microcomputer Symposium" at Wembley Conference Centre, London. Tickets cost £3.50 and hosting the event on a Saturday pitched it at an amateur/hobbyist rather than a professional audience. The event included a raffle for a Nascom 1 computer kit. About 550 people attended the symposium and over 300 kits were sold in the two weeks following the launch.
The symposium was covered in detail in Issue 1 of PCW magazine and the Nascom 1 was the cover photograph for that issue (though not with the final keyboard). An article in that issue by K. S. Borland (another director of Nasco Sales Ltd) described the origins and history of the Nascom 1 design.
In January 1978, the Lynx Electronics advert in Practical Electronics listed the Nascom 1 in addition to their traditional list of electronic components. By February 1978 and thereafter the whole of their advert was devoted to the Nascom 1.
After the success of their seminar in Wembley, Lynx electronics held a similar event in Manchester (Saturday, 1 April 1978. Tickets cost £5.50).
The launch price for the Nascom 1 was £197.50 plus 8% VAT, in kit form. The kit included keyboard and sockets for some (but not all) of the ICs. The purchaser needed to supply a TV, a cassette recorder and a power supply. Over its lifetime, the price was reduced to £165 + VAT (March 1979) then £125 + VAT or £140 + VAT assembled (January 1980).
By July 1978, The Micronics Company was advertising a cased, built and tested Nascom 1 (with power supply) for £399 + VAT. The advert does not name the machine as a Nascom 1 but the specification is identical.
By January 1979, Lynx Electronics had appointed multiple dealers in the UK and were advertising as Nascom Microcomputers, with the "nm" logo.
In September 1979, PCW reported that Grovewood Securities had invested £500,000 in Nascom. The same article reported that PAL full-colour support would arrive for the Nascom by "the new year".
In September 1979, the Nascom 2 (kit) was announced with a list price of £295 + VAT.
Then, Nascom were hit by a shortage of Mostek MK4118 1Kx8 RAM devices. 10 devices were required per Nascom 2 (1 each for video RAM and workspace RAM respectively, 8 for user RAM) but Nascom were only able to source 5,000 parts. By November 1979 Nascom had decided to relaunch the product with a 16Kbyte DRAM board and NASBUS interconnect but to keep the price at £295 + VAT. This arrangement only required 2 MK4118 devices, allowing Nascom to ship 2,500 systems. By December 1979, PCW reported that the first deliveries of the Nascom 2 were going out.
On 23 May 1980, Nascom reported that it had asked Grovewood Securities Ltd to appoint a receiver after it had been unable to secure further investment. Grovewood appointed Messrs Cork Gully, and Marshall resigned from the company to start a new business, Gemini Computers.
Nascom continued to trade in receivership. In July 1981, PCW reported that Nascom had been bought by Lucas Industries; the same issue contained a full-page advert under the name "Nascom Microcomputers. Division of Lucas Logic Ltd".
In December 1981, the Nascom 3 was launched. This was basically a cased Nascom 2 with some expansion boards.
In June 1984, the final issue of the Nascom Newsletter was published.
In January 1985, PCW published a letter from Lucas Nascom stating that, while the Nascom 1 had been discontinued, the Nascom 2 and Nascom 3 were still in production.
Unit Sales
A Nascom advert in January 1980 claimed "over 15,000 systems in operation world-wide".
In a retrospective published in May 1989, Marshall claimed that, by May 1980, Nascom had shipped over 35,000 Nascom 1 and Nascom 2 systems, all in kit form.
Nascom reported sales of £250,000 in April 1980
Documentation The Nascom 1 and Nascom 2 were supplied with full documentation including circuit schematics, construction guide, datasheets for some components and assembly listing for the ROM monitor. An annotated disassembly listing of the Nascom 2 Microsoft ROM BASIC was published and the code was subsequently re-purposed in retrocomputing projects such as Grant Searle's Multicomp and Spencer Owen's RC2014. The source code can now be found on GitHub.
Hardware
The Nascom 1 and Nascom 2 hardware designs had these features in common:
A 16 MHz crystal biased into oscillation and then divided down to create the clocks for the CPU, the serial communications and the video interface A Z80/Z80A CPU A Z80/Z80A PIO A Harris 6402 UART (or equivalent) that could be used either to communicate with a serial device (e.g. RS232 terminal or printer) or to save and load data using a domestic compact cassette recorder. A memory-mapped video display and a UHF video modulator capable of driving a domestic TV Circuitry decoded on IO port 0 to control a software-scanned keyboard, to drive a LED ("DRIVE") and to generate a timed non-maskable interrupt (NMI) that was used to provide a hardware single-step capability An LED ("HALT") on the Z80-CPU "/HALT" output, to provide a visual indication that the CPU was halted.
The I/O address map was common between the Nascom 1 and Nascom 2 designs, and the memory address map of the Nascom 2 was a superset of the Nascom 1 memory address map; this allowed a high degree of software compatibility between the two machines.
The Nascom 1 was implemented entirely using off-the-shelf integrated-circuits and other electronic components. The Nascom 2 used 4, 16-pin bipolar PROMs which acted as glue logic for decode functions ("N2MD" for memory decode, "N2IO" for I/O decode, "N2V" for video decode and N2DB" for data bus buffer control).
The Nascom 2 had these additional features that were not present on the Nascom 1:
Power-on reset with timing control to reset the CPU without interrupting the periodic refresh cycles produced by the Z80 Gating to reset the Z80-PIO (the Z80-PIO has no dedicated reset input) A reset-jump circuit that allowed the Z80-CPU to start execution from any 4-Kbyte boundary after reset (the Z80-CPU usually fetches from address 0 after reset). This allowed, for example, control to be passed straight to the BASIC interpreter after reset. Microsoft BASIC in an 8Kbyte ROM. Two groups of 4 uncommitted 24-pin DIL sockets. Each group could be configured to accommodate 1Kx8 ROM or RAM devices and decoded at a start address of 0x1000, 0x2000, 0xB000, 0xC000 or 0xD000. A 24-pin DIL socket that could accommodate a second character-generator ROM Full buffering of the CPU address, data and control to generate the "NAS-BUS" expansion bus.
The Nascom 1 used DIL sockets for making external connections. The photo shows 4 sockets, used for keyboard, serial (cassette and/or teletype/printer), PIO port A, PIO port B. The small "daughterboard" is a home-made implementation of the "snow plough" circuit referred to below.
The I/O address map was decoded as follows: +I/O Port addressFunction0x0 (read)Read keyboard state0x0 (write)Control keyboard, control single-step (NMI) logic, control "DRIVE" LED0x1UART Data0x2UART Control/Status0x3Unused0x4Z80-PIO Data Port A0x5Z80-PIO Data Port B0x6Z80-PIO Control Port A0x7Z80-PIO Control Port B On an unexpanded system, these 8 ports were repeated through the whole of the I/O address space. On an expanded system, the bus signal /NASIO allowed control of the I/O address space.
The memory address map was decoded as follows: +AddressNascom 1Nascom 20x0000-0x07FFMonitor (NASBUG, T4, NAS-SYS1, NAS-SYS3) 1 or 2 1Kbyte 2708 EPROMMonitor (NAS-SYS1 or NAS-SYS3) 2Kbyte ROM or 2716 EPROM0x0800-0x0BFFVideo RAMVideo RAM0x0C00-0x0FFFWorkspace RAMWorkspace RAM0x1000-0x1FFFDecoded on board. Usually used for RAM (4, 1Kbyte devices)0x2000-0x2FFFDecoded on board. Usually used for RAM (4, 1Kbyte devices)0xB000-0xBFFFDecoded on board. Usually used for EPROM (4, 1Kbyte 2708 devices)0xC000-0xCFFFDecoded on board. Usually used for EPROM (4, 1Kbyte 2708 devices)0xD000-0xDFFFDecoded on board. Usually used for EPROM (4, 1Kbyte 2708 devices)0xE000-0xFFFFMicrosoft 8Kbyte ROM BASIC
Keyboard
The Nascom keyboards used Licon solid-state (induction transformer) key switches in a matrix arrangement which was scanned under software control. The keys were mounted in a metal frame that was riveted to a single-sided fibreglass PCB. The frame improves reliability by preventing the force of repeated keystrokes from being transmitted to the solder joints that connect the key switches to the PCB. A separate, conventional, key switch was provided on the keyboard for hardware reset.
The Nascom 1 had 47 keys. The Nascom 2 had 10 additional keys (GRAPH, which toggled bit 7, CTRL, a second SHIFT key, 4 cursor direction keys, LF/CH and keys for [ and ]).
The Nascom 2 keyboard was designed to be mounted at an angle; it had angled key-caps which were horizontal when the keyboard itself was mounted at an angle. The key-caps on the Nascom 1 were not angled (see photo).