McCombo stars in any system

The McCombo microcomputer from Zytec International Products Limited is yet another Z80 CP/M 2.2 system, and like many of these, neither the company or the computer itself seems to have left any trace.

However, it's slightly more interesting than some in the approach the company is taking, which is to only supply the base unit and let the purchaser get the rest - terminal, printers, or whatever - from wherever they want.

The design of the micro is also a bit different from the usual run-of-the-mill box, and of course the name is somewhat surprising: McDonald's, the company that is infamous for naming everything McWhatever, had been around in the UK since 1974, so it would be surprising if Sytek wasn't aware of it. 

So maybe the American burger chain simply didn't assert its trading-name style in the early 1980s, or perhaps the company's founders really were Scottish.

Although there's not much information about Zytek or its micro, other than it ran a 4MHz [!Z80|Z80A] and provided four RS232 ports for mainframe connection or terminal connections, it's likely that the McCombo itself came out of an eight-month research project into the microcomputer market undertaken by Discom of Evesham.

The end result was the idea to design a compact single-board multi-user micro which could run CP/M and which was small enough for resellers to cram into a terminal or disk-drive housing, and which crucially would require little or no further development costs in order to turn it into a working system.

Discom even reckoned that its McCombo, which was announced around March 1982, was the micro which would "take on the world and win", with initial reaction to the idea being so good that the company was forecasting sales of 3,000 units for the rest of the year[source: "Best of British", Practical Electronics, April 1982, p. 15, https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Practical-Electronics/80s/Practical-Electronics-1982-04.pdf]".


And so, it looks like Zytek had run with this idea and - as Discom had intended - had shoved one of the boards into what is essentially a floppy disk unit and was selling it under the same McCombo name.

There's no price shown for Zytek's integration, but introductory prices for the bare McCombo boards started from under £400, which is about [[400|1982]] in [[now]].

To add to the confusion, the same McCombo box was advertised in May 1982's PCW, but then it was apparently designed and built in the UK by Megabrain Computers Limited. 

Given that the two companies resided at the same Ganton Street, Soho address, it looks simply like a change of company name. Perhaps Megabrain just sounded too much like a cartoon villain.

That advert does however actually give a price for the Zytek/Megabrain double-disk McCombo of £1,088 plus VAT, or about [[1251|1982]] now, which was actually pretty cheap for a micro capable of supporting four users - although to do that you'd have to buy a copy of MP/M or similar. 

The company didn't seem to last too long as, according to a post from Stewart Bell of either manufacturer Zytek or developer/designer Discom[source: https://www.facebook.com/groups/retrocomputers/posts/2628623083834223/], the floppy disk drives that the company had sourced from [@Olivetti] were "rubbish".

Presumably, that led to either high returns or low sales and the company went bust sometime afterwards, although it was still being mentioned in the 1984 edition of the Microcomputer Users Handbook[source: https://books.google.se/books?id=qZiwCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA256&lpg=PA256&dq=Zytec+McCombo&source=bl#v=onepage&q=Zytec%20McCombo&f=false].