INMC 80 News

should have Naspen. Experience required – None (preferable). Must live in the South East, but committee meetings usually held (evenings) in North London and no travel expenses offered.

Articles wanted

To keep this newsletter going we need articles, preferably readable and understandable, on any Nascom related subject. You’ll notice from this issue that we have had another couple of volunteers, but we need more. The more you put into this thing, the more you will get out of it.

So to sum up, the news is; the INMC still exists, and we intend (with your help) to make the Newsletters bigger, better and more informative. But we need more help from distributors (advertising), committee (one Dodo), and everyone else (articles/​reviews/​comments).

Dave Hunt

NAS­COM Is Dead – Long Live NAS­COM

The story so far. Nascom started from humble beginnings in November 1977, as an offshoot of a semiconductor distributor, Nasco Ltd. They did well, too well. Expansion requires money for development and marketing, and money comes from banks and places like that. You try walking into a bank (any bank) and try to get a loan without either previous credit history, or on the promise that what you intend to do with the money will make the bank’s fortune. When you pick yourself up off the door step, consider Nascom’s problem.

Nascom 2 was an expensive exercise, financed by Nascom, but money to get it into production was provided by the ‘city’. Nascom’s return on Nascom 2 was immediately frustrated by component supply difficulties and instead of making a healthy profit the ‘give away 16K RAM’ exercise was born. Their expansion came to an abrupt stop when the ‘city financial institution’ decided it was not prepared to continue to allow Nascom sufficient working capital to continue. Nascom were presented with no choice but to call in a Receiver. See Guy Kewney’s article on page 42 of July 80 edition of PCW.

What now ? The Receiver is keeping Nascom going until such time as a buyer is found. He is even getting the Floppy Disk Controller, the Programmable Character Generator and the Colour Board into production. We understand that there are a number of potential purchasers in the offing. The future of Nascom is very much at the mercy of whoever ultimately buys it, but some predictions can be made. Any purchaser is unlikely to ‘asset strip’ as Nascom has few tangible assets to strip, therefore anyone buying it can only do so with the intention of keeping it going. However, the purchaser is not committed to produce’ those Nascom items still waiting to see the light of day. For instance, the ‘System 80’ box may be restyled and further delayed.

In any event, it seems that Nascom will continue in some form or other, and whilst the product exists we will do our best to support it.