Scor­pio News

(these were 16K x 1!) created as a result of soaring demand from companies such as Sinclair, Acorn, Apple, Commodore and ourselves.

These sort of problems put a great strain on the cash resources of the company and we were forced to find external funding. This finally materialised in the summer of 1979 in the form of a deal with Grovewood Securities who provided much needed cash on a very attractive basis. Unfortunately we fell into the classic trap of not asking for enough cash initially, and when we returned in January 1980 asking for more we were refused.

I felt at the time that this was a bad decision on Grovewoods’ part and nothing that has happened subsequently has made me change my mind. It was also untypical of the far-sighted policies usually followed by John Danny, the Chairman of Grovewood. It was only a matter of months before the inevitable occurred, during which time I tried to drastically cut overheads in order to save the company. I also became embroiled in a particularly bloody boardroom battle which resulted in the dismissal of all of the directors of the company. Every avenue of refinance was explored, but without success, and on 27 May I was forced to ask Grovewood to appoint a Receiver, thus achieving the somewhat dubious claim of being the first microcomputer company to seek protection from its creditors by this means.

Grovewood appointed Messrs Cork Gully to manage the company’s affairs and, much to their relief, I decided to quit within a month of the Receiver’s arrival. Nascom stayed in receivership for nearly 2 years, apparently trading at a profit before being bought by Lucas and I have often considered that this fact alone vindicated my request for more finance.

Any contractual restriction on my activities were terminated when Cork Gully took over and I immediately established Gemini in Amersham, with a view to exploiting the demand for peripherals for Nascom systems. I was forced to use my house as collateral for a bank loan and was successful in persuading all but one of my old suppliers at Nascom to give me credit at Gemini notwithstanding the losses they had recently sustained.

We sub-contracted all of the design and manufacturing activities, paying only for results. Within 18 months we were ready to launch our own CPU boards and subsequently introduced the CP/M based Galaxy system at the ‘Which’ Computer Show in January 1982.

I watched the arrival of IBM with great trepidation and avoided chasing either the clone or add-on markets because of the cash problems that I could see developing. Gemini focused its activities on niche-type markets, thereby side-stepping any confrontation with the larger companies who had arrived on the scene. We produced our first 68000-based designs in 1985, whilst continuing to support our