The Nascom came as a Kit consisting of Printed Circuit Boards, IC's, Resistors, Capacitors, Wire etc. which had to be assembled into the Computer. When it was working, information could be input through a High-Quality Keyboard (better than most Keyboards found on PC's today but with fewer keys), the video output being sent to a domestic TV. Program and data storage and retrieval was done via a cassette recorder. There was no graphics, colour, mouse, dvd/cd roms, floppy drives, hard drives, windows/GUI's or sound

The Nascom II came as the successor to the highly popular Nascom, and in this case it had several enhancements including the inclusion of Microsoft 8K Basic

Sadly from what information I obtained at the time, the Nascom II was meant to include 8KB of static memory which was either too expensive or not available in sufficient quantities. The result was that Nascom had to give away their 32KB Daughterboard at great cost to themselves and Nascom's eventually going under. Lucas Logic eventually took over the operation and tried to develop the Nascom into business and education. Given the existence of other major computer manufacturers with complete assembled computers and widely available software and hardware add-ons, the Nascom Project was completely abandoned by the early 80's.

Early Faults

My first big problem was the documentation, there were some five sheets covering some 30-odd documentation errors.

Having finally built the Nascom I found I had two problems:

The First Problem was that screen was out of position in that I could not see part of the screen that I was typing on and squares were being displayed from the hidden parts of the display. This turned out to be a well known problem with the Nascom and from a Magazine article was corrected using a capacitor.

My Second problem was that Basic was difficult to start and the computer would eventually crash and freeze up. I was unable to resolve this problem and returned it to the shop for help. Over the weeks the shop kept telling me that they were still trying to resolve the problem. Eventually (having heard of Nascom's problems), I asked for the item back. The computer was returned immediately in a clearly untouched condition. Through a friend I was introduced to someone with much greater expertise. He quickly found the problem to be two identical IC's, one TTL and one LS, which had got mixed between the motherboard and the daughterboard. With this resolved, I now had a fully working computer

Computer Upgrades and Hardware Modifications

My first upgrade was to purchase the Graphics Chip which contained the 128 extra ASCII characters. Within 6 months I had also purchased a 16kB upgrade to 32kB fully populating the daughterboard at a cost of £35.

Not satisfied with the computer's current look (and safety), I acquired a case from "Simple Software" which turned out to be a great improvement.

In 1982 I purchased what was called the "64 kilobyte Dynamic Ram Card with Programmable Graphics" PCB. Having also purchased all the components I assembled the board and installed a total of 64KB of Ram this time (although some of this was blocked by the 2kB Monitor, 2kB Static Ram and 8kB Rom Basic, a total loss of 12kB of Ram leaving 52kB of Ram available for programs.

The PCB also came with a Programmable Graphics Generator. This circuit was wired via a very short umbilical connector from the underside of the PCB to the socket that contained the Graphics Chip (the one with the extra 128 ASCII characters. This meant that although you lost the 128 Graphics Characters you gained some form of graphics on the Nascom

Part of this PCB carried some spare logic that allowed one to disable part of the main RAM and allow the Programmable Graphics to be addressed and written to and read from. After some study of this logic and contrary to the PCB's manufacturer's original intentions, I was able to wire it so I could to the Graphics at address 0000H (that is the 2kB of Programmable Graphics occupied the same memory location as the 2kB Monitor, though there was no way to read it's contents). It turned out that a few Radio Ham friends of mine had worked out the same modification, thus avoiding any further losses of memory.

One interesting feature about this PCB was that for Nascom II owners, you had to saw part of the board off. On the other hand Nascom I owners left this part on effectively converting a Nascom I to a Nascom II

A further upgrade I carried out was based on a modification in a magazine. This allowed the use of a spare port address (03H) on the motherboard, to be used to drive a circuit (see Micropower Volume 2 Number 2 Page 2 - this can be downloaded from the documents section) that switched the empty memory banks on the mother board. My own variant on this was to be able to switch Basic out/Ram in or even select a socket with the Graphics Chip in (thus getting the 128 extended ASCII characters back subject to copying them over to address 0000H)

Sometime later, I built an add-on board that allowed me to use another pre-wired port to drive an AY-3-8910 Programmable Sound Generator (I believe they may have used this in the Atari ST). This gave me scope for further experimentation (my computer now had sound, sort of). Unfortunately this sort of thing was in its infancy and now useful software to exploit this chip was available so I had limited success at generating music

About this time, my Power Supply blew up. Turned out to be a Bridge Rectifier getting too hot and burning out causing a short-circuit to the transformer. The solder on the connecting cables melted and the cables disconnected. I obtained a higher rating Bridge Rectifier and then built a much bigger heat-sink out of copper and sprayed it with matt-black paint (you can see this mod in the photo gallery). No further problems were had with the PSU from then on.

A Year later, another PCB appeared on the market that looked interesting. It was known as the "Animation Graphics Board". It was a composite board designed to incorporate the following different features. High Resolution Colour Graphics, 2 x AY-3-8910 Sound Generators, On board Clock, Extra Storage Ram, CTC Counter Timer Chip and an Analogue to Digital Converter. A bonus feature was that users need only add those parts that they want. This was helpful because I eventually realised that the Graphics Chip required a monitor (a considerable expense at that time) thus I was spared the cost of buying expensive Graphics IC's. The other items, however, gave me considerable opportunity for interesting experimentation.

Adding a third board did present a problem, however, as the small bus board only had two sockets which were both in use. I was able to track down the supplier of the sockets and it was here I did something somewhat dodgy in nature. I bent the socket's connectors to the side, and soldered them to the Vero tracks on the small bus board. A messy solution and I am surprised the computer never blew up (in fact I have always wondered if the PSU was really coping with the load)

Software Programming

My interest in owning a computer was to find out what it was really all about. For years, computers were a complete mystery, big expensive machines controlled by boffins. The TV and Film industry were even worse in that they created a complete fantasy around them.

A friend loaned me a book called "Instant Basic by the Dilithium Press" which taught me everything I needed to know about Basic. From then on programs were copied from magazines (and when the skills developed converted from incompatible Basic Programs), tested, debugged (after much screaming), tested and finally got working, then improved upon. Eventually I started writing my own programs of ever increasing sophistication.

Next I started developing my skills in Assembler (actually I did not have an Assembler, so I did it the hard way, I hand coded in Hex).

After upgrading the computer with Programmable Graphics, I used Basic to develop a Maze Program. It was slow so I then converted it to Machine Code. It was an exciting sensation to visually and quickly move down corridors and turn at junctions (and get lost) since I had never seen anything like it before.

Then I purchased "Xtal Basic" which had the advantage of being better, faster than Microsoft Basic and allowed the writing and incorporation of extra commands by the User.

Eventually I could no longer resist the temptation; I purchased a computer game, Level 9's Colossal Adventure. Up to then I had been a computer purist writing games to hone programming skills, not to play them.

Finally

All things come to an end and eventually in the Mid 80's I brought a Sinclair Spectrum 48K. This allowed me greater scope for development of my skills especially as it can with sound + colour graphics. In the late 80's I purchased an Atari ST512. Though far more powerful, it was a totally different CPU and working with the Operating System was more difficult. During this period, demands on my time increased somewhat, so I really had no time anymore to get that deeply involved in computers. Finally in 1995 the PC had become more interesting and useful (because of Windows 95, Multimedia, Internet and Gigabyte Hardrives) so I started on a Pentium 100MHz then a Pentium III-450MHz and currently an Athlon XP-2600. Next year it maybe a 64Bit, Dual Core, Hyperthreading CPU the way technology is going.

I still have my old Nascom (see Photo Gallery) though I don't dare switch it on now. I did download a really excellent emulator from the Nascom Home Page (www.nascomhomepage.com) and was able to run some of my old software or download replacements if my tapes did not work. This site is perhaps the most comprehensive site devoted to the Nascom.