The Road to Dragon Data
John’s first job in computing wasn’t with Dragon Data but with Kalamazoo Business Systems as a ‘computer operator’, with such tasks as executing programs, loading tapes, and changing printer ribbons, a major benefit of this job was that it included attending computer night classes. After taking the “gap year” at Kalamazoo and getting a foundation in computing from the night classes, John joined the Bsc Computer Studies course at the Polytechnic of Wales.  Wales poly was one of the first real Computer Studies courses in the early 80’s. Wales poly was quite modern at the time, covering programming in Fortran and Assembly, plus they had good (modern) equipment (VDU’s etc.), which some universities at the time didn’t have. The course was 4 years with a sandwich year ,with the sandwich year spent at IBM, on Wigmore St London. This was around the time of the first PC release and there was rivalry in IBM between the departments, IBM mainframe vs the newly released IBM PC vs Typing (electric typewriters). John recalls the company culture of IBM was somewhat off-putting, with one example being their “optional” company picnic, but it was made clear that your lack of attendance would be “noticed”.  His final polytechnic project, was a kitchen design software/CAD program, that would also produce a quote and picking list. John’s professor introduced him to a local kitchen installer who also provided positive feedback. The kitchen design software would have taken quite a bit to put into production so it didn’t go forward. John’s professor also knew Derek Williams (Technical Manager) at Dragon Data, so a letter was posted off to Derek enquiring about a job. He was shortly invited in for an interview and after an ½ hour interview John was in at Dragon Data as a programmer!  Finally Graduating Wales polytechnic in 1983 at age 23, he was then quickly onto Dragon at Kenfig.

Dragon Data
John joined the development team in August '83 reporting to Duncan Smeed, who had pretty much been on his own for software development up to this point. Taking up residence in Porthcawl with Stewart Price (a “Jnr. hardware guy”), who did all the wire wrapping for the hardware development prototyping. Initially he had worries over joining such an experienced team (especially being straight out of poly) but Duncan was great and people listened (to his ideas etc.). For example when John designed and put the Beta logo in the character ROM, “there were no design meetings, you were just trusted to do the right thing”.

Primarily taken on to work on the Alpha/Beta prototypes, as the D64 was done by the time he arrived.  He described his work there as: “..worked on the prototype of the twin processor Dragon 128 (8088 + 6809 if I remember correctly**) and later, the more evolutionary twin disk (720K 3.5") Alpha/Professional. I was also responsible for ongoing maintenance of Dragon DOS (for the Alpha) which was originally done by an outside contractor, fixing bugs in Microsoft ROM Basic (yes - the source contained comments by Bill Gates), and driving various bits of hardware that we added to the basic design including the modem, sound chips, disk drives, the boot sequence etc... I have fond memories of creating products with some pretty primitive development systems. I also designed and implemented the Alpha boot screen. Used a special character set to do the (Dragon logo) graphics". In addition to this work John also worked on items including:
     • Built in diagnostics on the Alpha.
     • PRESTEL (most likely the Alpha)
     • Character set in the Beta ROM.
     • Character set for the Alpha.
     • "Simple" Graphics design / drawing program for the Beta
The development work was (primarily) on the Motorola Development System (6809 dev) and logic analysers. With it being common practice in development to put patches directly into EEPROMs to jump out of the problem area and into the patch. Once proven the code could be updated in the source (by fixing the problem area) with the tested patch. John recalled asking for a sound chip to be put into the Beta, but Jan (Wojna), “who was a great h/w engineer” suggested to ‘waggle’ a pin for sound instead, ‘as sound chips cost money and software is free’.
When asked about the issues / problems at Dragon, he cited that the “Dragon 32 was the right product at the right time (for DD)” but moving forward (DD) was “did not have the time or resources to carry out what was needed (for the products). With the Beta needing business applications, and better connectivity such as a terminal emulator”. This lack of software also led to “no priority in developing to the Light-pen and Mouse on the Beta, as no direct application was available at that time to use them”.
Financially Dragon was getting into trouble at this time but John saw “no extravagances at Dragon Data”. Whilst not involved in the Touchmaster tablet project which was being developed by DD at the same time as the Alpha & Beta, he thought the “Touchmaster was a very long shot, especially after solving the touch layer separation issue with bridal veil material”.
After only 9 months the Dragon experience was over, but John, Duncan, and Jan from the development team stayed together as they moved on to Thorn EMI, to work on the Liberator project.  So just as the doors began closing for the final time at Dragon a new one opened at Thorn.
Summing up his time at Dragon Data with the development team, “It was great… you could just do your work (empowered). No one kicked you in the balls for just doing a task in your own way, it was such a great experience (especially) for a first job, with the opportunity to work with clever people”.

Liberation
The move to Thorn EMI working on the Liberator project, meant staying in South Wales with a move up the valleys to Merthyr Tydfil. John was responsible for writing the built-in word processor, file transfer and terminal emulator software.  Development was done out of an analogue (rotary dial) phone production site and John remembers crossing picket lines, as they were facing closure due to British Telecom phasing out rotary phones. A quirk of working at the phone factory was that the Liberator team were served lunch in a separate room (to the phone production staff) as they were ‘management’.
Around 400-600 Liberators were made, and “retrospectively it was more influential than we (the dev team) thought (at the time), i.e. in the civil service people who used them loved them, and it changed their ideas on computing/tech, with many not wanting to give them up. This is even more relevant as many of it’s users hadn’t used a keyboard, let alone a computer, (esp.) with many mangers etc. who previously had secretaries”. Because of this lack of experience in the user base, one of the pieces of software John wrote for the project was ‘keyfam’ a keyboard familiarisation program, to aid new computer users learn how to use the keyboard. There was very little technology carry over from the Dragon to the Liberator project “just experience”, his experience of PRESTEL on the Dragon came in useful as it aided the writing of a PRESTEL terminal emulator for the Liberator. John recalled that years later in a job interview, the interviewer being impressed that he had implemented PRESTEL in monochrome.

Post Liberator
After the wrap up of the Liberator project and subsequent closure of the Merthyr factory, John stayed with Thorn and moved to their Bristol development centre. “Thorn was still big in consumer products at this time” and had the opportunity to work on some cool products, including early development of a laptop “like the GRID (Compass)”. John ported the Liberator applications to the IBM PC in anticipation of this.  But it was too late for the market “Overdue”, with other companies coming into the laptop market and the GRID failing, which sealed the fate of the project at Thorn. The team also, “Looked at a video jukebox, using vinyl disks (RCA CED) for video playback, it went nowhere”.

After Thorn, John moved to Digital Reasearch at their UK development centre in Hungerford, during his work there Digital Research was purchased by Novell. Key points of note during his time there:
     • Helping make Concurrent DOS compatible with MS-DOS which would become DR-DOS. TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) programs being the “Biggest difficulties”
     • Porting Digital Research’s Graphical Environment Manager (GEM, a Windows competitor) to run as a file manager on DR-DOS.
     • Became product manager for DR-DOS before the end of the project.     
     • Novell DOS 7.
     • and being... “An engineer that could be put in front of a customer”
As work on DR-DOS wound down, Novell made cuts which unfortunately led to John being made redundant, but this wasn’t the end at Novell. Within a few weeks he was asked back to Novell, and shortly moved to California. Initially working on marketing Novell’s internet/LAN networking products and then later moving into business development.

In 1999 the move was made to an E-commerce startup, followed by other startups including, ‘CloudTalk’ (social media), and later ‘SolarCity’, where he led marketing for 3 years, Solar City being founded by two of Elon Musk’s cousins.  Shortly after John left Solar City it was merged into Tesla as Tesla Energy.

John now enjoys his retirement in California with his passion project Classic Motor Films.

** The known Beta (Dragon 128) prototype uses two 68B09's not an 8088 as suggested by John.  Duncan Smeed has also mentioned the 8088 before, so this back's up John's comment.  From conversations with John and Duncan it seems that this never happened due to the difficulties of using two processors with different architectures and assembly language.

A big thank you to John for taking time out of his UK holiday to go over his Dragon Memories (and more).

Duncan Smeed (L) and John Linney (2022)

An example of John's work, the boot and diagnostic screens from the Alpha/Professional.