Do you have room in your life to adopt an orphaned 80s microcomputer? The NewBrain is perhaps the most thoroughly orphaned machine in British computing history.
The NewBrain’s origins lie at Sinclair Radionics, and in an alternate universe it might have been the first microcomputer released under the Sinclair label. Hardware engineer Mike Wakefield had been tasked with building a British machine to take on the Apple II and Commodore PET. However, Clive Sinclair was chafing under the National Enterprise Board, the Labour government’s vehicle for propping up strategically important industries, which had taken a majority share in Radionics in 1976 due to the company’s financial struggles. Sinclair and the NEB eventually lost patience with each other, and Clive accepted a golden handshake to leave. He went off to release the ZX80 at Science of Cambridge, which later became Sinclair Research, and the rest is history — at least in our timeline.
Meanwhile, the NewBrain continued without him. Sinclair Radionics was wound up and the NEB transferred the project to Newbury Laboratories, who gave the machine its name and announced three models — including a battery-powered portable — in 1980. When the BBC was developing its Computer Literacy Project and looking for a standard micro to feature on the show, the NewBrain was their preferred candidate. In an alternate universe that’s the end of the story: the NewBrain ships on time and becomes the BBC Micro. In our universe, Newbury couldn’t deliver, the BBC opened the tender to other bidders and Chris Curry talked them into accepting the Acorn Proton. Game, set and match.
The NewBrain eventually landed with Grundy Business Systems, who sold around 50,000 units between 1982 and 1983. Had it arrived when originally intended, its floating point precision, high-resolution graphics and expandability to 2MB of RAM would have been genuinely remarkable — up against the Apple II and PET, it would have turned heads. Against the Spectrum and its contemporaries it was less so. It found a niche with scientists and educators, sold reasonably well in the Netherlands, Denmark and Greece, and, for reasons history does not make entirely clear, Angola.