Dragon Data was a Welsh

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...

 producer of 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...

s during the early 1980s. These computers, the Dragon 32 and Dragon 64

Dragon 32/64

The Dragon 32 and Dragon 64 are home computers that were built in the 1980s. The Dragons are very similar to the TRS-80 Color Computer , and were produced for the European market by Dragon Data, Ltd., in Port Talbot, Wales, and for the US market by Tano of New Orleans, Louisiana...

, strongly resembled the Tandy

Tandy Corporation

Tandy Corporation was a family-owned leather goods company based in Fort Worth, Texas. Tandy was founded in 1919 as a leather supply store, and acquired RadioShack in 1963. The Tandy name was dropped in May 2000, when RadioShack Corporation was made the official name.-History:Tandy began in 1919...

 TRS-80 Color Computer

TRS-80 Color Computer

The Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer was a home computer launched in 1980. It was one of the earliest of the first generation of computers marketed for home use in English-speaking markets...

 ("CoCo")—both followed a standard Motorola datasheet configuration for the three key components (CPU, SAM and VDG). The machines came in both 32KB and (later) 64KB versions.

The history of Dragon Data in the period 1982–84 was a chequered one. The company was originally set up by a Toy Company called Mettoy, and after initial good sales looked to have a bright future. At its high point it entered negotiations with Rexnord's Tano Corporation to form a North American branch. Mettoy then suffered financial difficulties, casting a shadow on the future of Dragon Data before it was spun off as a separate company. However, a number of circumstances (the delay in introducing the 64K model, poor colour support with a maximum of 4 colours displayable in "graphics mode" and only 2 colours in the highest 256 × 192 pixel mode, the late introduction of the external disk unit and of the supporting OS9-based software) caused the company to lose market share.

To combat this, under the control of GEC, Dragon Data worked on the next generation of Dragon computers - the Dragon Alpha (or Professional) and Beta (or 128). These systems only made it to the prototype stage before the business went into receivership and was sold on to the Spanish startup Eurohard in 1984. Unfortunately Eurohard also suffered financial problems and went into receivership a couple of years later after the release of the Dragon 200.

In addition to the Dragon 32 and 64, an MSX

MSX

MSX was the name of a standardized home computer architecture in the 1980s conceived by Kazuhiko Nishi, then Vice-president at Microsoft Japan and Director at ASCII Corporation...

-compatible machine, the Dragon MSX

Dragon MSX

The Dragon MSX MSX 1 home computer was designed by Radofin for Dragon Data, which were well known for their Dragon 64 home computer, a clone of the TRS-80 Color Computer....

reached the prototype stage.

External links

• A Slayed Beast - History of the Dragon computer – From The DRAGON Archive
• Dedicated wiki