Newbury. Growing Mighty with the Micros

Newbury Laboratories will forever be associated with the NewBrain - the small, portable micro that was temporarily the choice to be the BBC Microcomputer. 

However, development was slow, production was difficult and once it became clear that it was going to be late, it was dropped and the contract was opened out, resulting with the BBC ending up at Acorn.

What became the NewBrain had actually been designed by Clive Sinclair's company Sinclair Radionics. 

Radionics was later part-nationalised by the National Enterprise Board, in order to keep it afloat, and the successful calculator part of the business was sold off whilst the remaining company carried on with the new machine.

Eventually, the NEB sold off the rest of the company, whilst the design was handed on to Newbury Laboratories. It was Newbury that actually gave it the name NewBrain.

When the company lost the BBC Micro contract, the government quango that had replaced the NEB - the British Technology Group - sold the NewBrain on to Grundy for a rumoured £600,000[source: "Newbrain to be saved?", Personal Computer News, September 1st 1983, p. 5]. 

Grundy bailed out of the micro business within a couple of years have built only 50,000 NewBrains[source: "Newbrain maker in trouble", Personal Computer News, 25-31 August, 1983, Vol. 1 No. 25, Page 2], but the machine had built up enough of a following that it was rescued by Tradecom International the following year[source: "Rising from the ashes", Personal Computer World, March 1984, p. 23-24].

Meanwhile, Newbury Laboratories - in what appears to be very much a one-off advert - has retreated back to its terminals business. There were even rumours that it had actually merged with its Newbear subsidiary[source: "The Bear is buried", Personal Computer World, February 1982, p. 61], which makes some sense in that context.

Either way, it's now selling terminals from Digital (DEC), ICL, Honeywell, Prime and Data General, as well as microcomputers from Comart, North Star and Apple.

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Back in 1979, ITV had broadcast an influential programme based on Dr. Christopher Evans' book The Mighty Micro. 

It was this that was said to influence the BBC to produce its own series of Computer Literacy programmes, first broadcasrt in January 1982, although planning for that had apparently started in 1978, the year before the ITV series was shown[source: "Behind the BBC programmes", YC, March 1982, p. 24-25].

And so "Growing Mighty with the Micros" might be a little dig at losing the contract for the BBC Micro.



