Dragon Professional

The sudden demise of Dragon Data unfortunately coincided with the companies entry into the business market. However, Liz Coley feels the Dragon Professional may be just the thing to get the company back on it's feet.

After months of speculation we all shook our heads as Dragon Data entered the hands of the receiver on 31 May 1984. At the same time the 3 1/2 disk drive, modem and OS9-equipped GEC Dragon Professional appeared for review at a suggested price of £699, with a single disk drive and £849 with double disk drives (incl VAT).
The '64 repackaged for business' flavour of the machine illustrates the dogged refusal of this Dragon to lie down despite a series of PR and marketing hashes that destroyed most of the companies credibility as a manufacturer of home computers.

Rise and Fall
Dragon Data commenced trading at the end of 1981 as an attempt by Swansea's Mettoy Ltd to grab a share of the rapidly expanding home computer market. To this end the Dragon 32 took shape as a low-cost alternative to the Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer, complete with the same Motorola 6809 microprocessor, 16K Microsoft Extended Color Basic and 32Kof user RAM. This, coupled with a recommended retail price of £199 - the same as the 3.5K equipped VIC at the time and £150 less than the Tandy - promised a bright future when the 32 was announced in August1982.
Initial high demand stretched the manufacturing and cash resources of Mettoy to the limit. By October 1982 most of Dragon Data had been sold off.
The new company seemed a viable proposition, but a curious lack of PR know-how put the focus on Mettoy's now irrelevant problems and gossip, fuelled by competitors, caused confidence in Dragon to nose-dive.
September 1983 saw the launch of the 64 plus175k single and double disk drives at the PCW show, coinciding with a further £4 million cash boost from shareholders - which again highlighted Dragon's difficulties. The 64 was received with muted enthusiasm and, a month later, Mettoy showed incredibly bad timing by folding.
Although Mettoy's financial interest in Dragon Data was a scant 18%, the memory of Dragon beginnings was fresh in the minds of all concerned. Limited development and frenzied but ineffectual marketing continued until February 1984 when another of the Prudential's heavy investments, GEC, was called in to oversee sales and marketing and to lend its respected name to prop up the now mistrusted Dragon logo. Freed of marketing responsibilities, hardcore Dragon people concentrated efforts on development, working to extend the GEC Dragon catalogue to include low-cost, self- contained business systems, such as the Professional, in an attempt to improve credibility but, it appears, too late and too expensive. GEC Dragon ceased trading on the point of launch.

Hardware
The Dragon Professional is, essentially: a Dragon 64 PCB redesigned to make room for the modem, disk controller and disk expansion port, additional diagnostic ROMS and a composite video output.
Along with this come one or two 500k (340k formatted), 31/2in Sony disk drives, an efficient switched mode power supply and a 1200 Baud Prestel 1/600 Baud machine link modem.
Everything comes in a standard Dragon bottom case with a restyled top cover that continues the slope of the rickety Dragon keyboard to the rear of the machine to form a wedge, increasing rear headroom in the process. Immediately above the keyboard on the left side are two minute LEDS; red power-on to the left and a green one to the right connected with modem operation.
The now familiar Sony micro floppy drives and the power supply are contained in a second wedge above the LEDS, with extra ventilation slots along the top. Drive door 0 emerges on the far right of the front panel. Drive I (if fitted) sits on its left next to a new GEC Dragon 'The Professional' logo, complete with green and blue 'go-faster' stripes. Each drive door panel sports a disk-eject button to the right and a red disk-in-use LED to the left and is finished in a light grey that enhances the visual effect of the otherwise mid grey livery.
The connectors fitted round the edge of the bottom case follow standard Dragon layout with a few changes. To the right is the expected cartridge connector. The left-hand side has the same line-up as the 64 with the exception of a one metre modem lead, fitted with a swish British Telecom 'phone plug, in place of one of the joystick ports.
This leaves TV output, reset button, modem lead, RS232 port, joystick port, tape connector and parallel Centronics printer port. Major surgery on the rear replaces the 'D' type transformer connector and push-button on/off switch with a one-piece mains supply panel consisting of a 3-pin Euro mains connector and a robust rocker switch.
Looking from the rear, the monitor socket remains to the right of the supply panel but gains two pins to provide RGB and composite video in the same cable. On the far left a new disk expansion connector allows the Professional to control up to two additional Dragon drives.
Removing four screws, one in each corner on the underside, frees the top case. There's an awful lot packed in there! As in the rest of the Dragon range, the keyboard lies across the front of the PCB attached by four screws. A two inch gap al lows access to the 6809 - with the rest of the PCB covered by a very solid cast aluminium frame fitted across the case providing a mounting for the closely-packed, fibre- board covered drives (on the twin drive review model) and power supply. This doubles as a massive heat sink in an attempt to disperse the excessive heat generated by the drives and, more importantly, the power supply. Massive though it is, the heat sink should have the aid of a cooling fan to keep this crowded environment cool, but more of that later. Sensibly, the drives are fitted with long ribbon cables so that releasing four easily accessed screws allows the frame to be swivelled backwards away from the case by simple removal of the PCB power connector. The rear half of the board is now open to scrutiny.
In the new layout the eight 4864 RAM chips from the 64 now extend under the keyboard from the right of the socket mounted 6809. Other socketed chips include the 6847 video display controller, 6883 SAM synchronous address multiplexer and the 8346 disk controller, as fitted in the Dragon disk interface cartridge, mounted directly beneath drive 0. Modem components are soldered directly into the board, adjacent to the cable outlet. The extensively reworked PCB layout seems relatively free from gross, hardwired after- thoughts, although there are two small, neatly fitted PCBs soldered proud of the board, possibly due to putting quarts in pint pots!

In Use
The review model supplied was highly temperamental in that it played ball for a short time, usually about an hour, randomly refused to obey commands and pretended that some files on disk didn't exist. This got rapidly and progressively worse until the machine gave up completely, requiring several hours to recover. Dragon personnel, when questioned, didn't seem at all surprised at this phenomenon and a second Professional was provided which soon suffered the identical problem.
Judging by the amount of heat transferred to the plastic case and, more alarmingly, to microfloppies within drives, the massive heat sink is definitely not enough to prevent heat from affecting operations. As an aside, interesting hang-ups could be obtained on both machines by pressing lightly on the case above the power supply. I persisted with the machine, on and off, over two days of these problems but tests of the supplied software were, of necessity, patchy and sketchy (a new ad agency?) as a consequence.
On power-up the Professional assumes 51-column monochrome mode. This is actually the 256x192, high resolution Dragon graphic mode 4, using simplified characters for standard text.
However, Dragon has taken the trouble to produce an attractive system boot menu that includes the Professional logo. Options given are 'B' to access the built-in Microsoft Basic and 'D' to boot a system disk in drive 0, in this case OS9. 'B' selects a 32k Dragon configuration complete with Microsoft copyright banner and lurid green screen. Curiously, EXEC (ENTER), the normal method of claiming the extra 32k of RAM, returns a syntax error. Also, Dragon DOS is not supplied so DOS commands have no effect from Basic and alternative routines were not apparent.

Software
Selecting 'D' from power-u p scrolls the display, resulting in the appearance of a delightful Sony drive and microfloppy graphic, inviting the insertion of the system disk. The 'shell' of essential OS9 control routines takes about 20 seconds to load. On completion a1980 Motorola and Microwave copyright banner appears with an invitation to 'log on'. The'OS9': prompt follows. On completion of a task the prompt reappears to remind you that you're still in OS9.
OS9 was developed by Microware as a Unix equivalent for the 6809, specifically to support compiled Basic 09. Although OS9 requires 96k of code, only the shell is held permanently in memory acting as the middle man, calling command routines from the remaining 80k on the system disk as required. This is possible because the 6809 uses position-independent code, or PIC, that can be loaded into, and run from, any point in memory. This makes memory management very efficient and enables several separate programs and routines to be stored at once.
In addition, files are stored on disk land, in a limited fashion, in memory) in a multi-level directory file system configured as a 'tree' structure where the main (or root) directory of a disk contains filenames that can refer to files of directories to other files, and so on, though any file can be called directly by name, however far up the tree its directory is. Another important feature is that OS9 supports, and the 6809 is capable of, some background processing, enabling limited multi-tasking.
All three business packages supplied with the Professional are contained on separate disks and depend on OS9 to operate- These were reviewed on the 64 in the June 1984 issue of PCW but it's worth noting in passing that Stylo- graph suffers badly from the 51-column screen and makeshift characters. It's almost impossible to use on a standard TV.
The review machine was not supplied with software to drive the modem or any further indications of modem performance, therefore its function can not be assessed. Dragon has further OS9 packages available, at extra cost, such as the compiled Basic 09, a 'C' compiler, Pascal, Cash & VAT bookkeeper, Stock Recorder and an Editor/Assembler/ Debugger; all at less than £80 per package.

Documentation
No specific Professional manuals were supplied; but if they match the standard of the readable and thorough, 64- orientated software manuals they will be adequate for all but the most demanding user.
All the software manuals abandon rear indexes in favour of detailed Tables of Contents at the front, refer- ring to clear paragraph headings by page number. I found this extremely convenient for finding particular command routines. I also liked the use of coloured pages for sections that refer to separate modules on the same disk.

Conclusion
The Professional certainly offers convenience, and better value than a fully equipped Dragon 64. Broadly:
... If Dragon recommences trading
... If the quoted prices are realistic
... If the cooling problems are over- come
and ... If a new incarnation of Dragon can regain lost credibility
... then even counting the QL the Dragon Professional would be hard to beat for small businesses.
Given suitable mouse and icon-driven software, eminently feasible with OS9, it would fulfil Dragon's promise of a self-contained, easy to use system at low cost, and clean up ! If not. .. Nothing.

END