U-MAN: The next step

With customers as diverse as British Telecom, Oxford and Cambridge universities, the British Cast Iron Research Association and London Weekend Television, U-Microcomputers Limited of Warrington, Cheshire - headed up by Bill Unsworth - was a company that seemed to specialise in Motorola 68000 microcomputers - both as single- and multi-user systems - that were aimed specifically at developers, or rather programmers as they were known in the 70s and 80s.

It also supplied its own multi-user operating system in the form of Mirage, which as well as offering CP/M-68K as a "sub task" also supported as much memory as was available, unlike native CP/M - or even MS-DOS - which in its earlier versions topped out at 64K.

There were also rumours that U-Micro was interested in the Tripos OS which had been ported by British company Metacomco for use as the Commodore Amiga's operating system. 

U-Micro, which had just released 2MB and 4MB memory expansion boards for the U-MAN micro, was in discussions with Metacomco, with Unsworth stating:
                                                                
~"We'd like to have a multi-tasking single-user system, and if Tripos does this, we'll go that way[source: Preparing for a fight, Newsprint, PCW, March 1986, p. 77]".

Tripos, developed at the University of Cambridge in the 1960s, was built to be portable across machines, with the 68000 processor being shared between the Amiga and U-MAN making things potentially even more straightforward.

It was already found on DEC's PDP-11, Data General's Nova, IBM's Series 1, multiple Intel 8086-based machines as well as several other 68000 machines, where it had been said that a recent port of Tripos from one 68000 machine to another required a change of <i>only two lines</i> of code in the Tripos kernel[source: Screentest: Tripos, PCW, June 1986, p. 140].

As well as a 10MHz Motorola 68000, the U-MAN Series 1000 Supermicro also shipped with a Motorola 6809 - the same processor as found in the Dragon home computer but used just for I/O - plus up to 15MB of memory. 

And thanks to its target software-developer market, it also came with an extensive range of languages for either CP/M or the optional UCSD p-system.

[picture: Umicro_uman_percw_mar85.webp|An earlier advert from the year before for the U-MAN system, showing the 40% discount on offer to programmers of "bona fide" projects.]

A U-MAN system with a 10MB hard disk retailed from £3,789, which is around [[3789|1986]] in [[now]] money. However, the company was offering discounts of up to 40% for programmers who could demonstrate that they were working on "bona fide projects".

[picture: UMicro_percw_dec81.webp|An early U-Microcomputers advert for the company's range of hardware boards and software for the Apple II. From PCW, December 1981]

The company itself started out in the late 1970s as the factory-appointed distributor of Ohio Scientific's range of machines for the north and midlands regions of the UK. Products included the Superboard II and Ohio's larger [=byte_1978-08_030|C3B][source: U-Microcomputers advert, PRAC, March 1979, p. 69].

By the early 1980s it had become a manufacturer of software and hardware products for the Apple II.  Hardware included boards like the U-Z80 second-processor card for £95, which is around [[95|1981]] in [[now]], or a £195 eight-port RS232 serial interface for plugging in either a lot of printers, or terminals.
