End Game...
On 27th May 1980 Nascom had called in the receivers. Production of the NASCOM computers was cut back and a planned "System 80" was cancelled. Stocks of the Nascom products to dealers became severely restricted, although the demand was still present.
There was discussion of Nascom being taken over by another company, but that failed to materialise. Meanwhile, the receivers were causing further problems. They effectively prevented the NAS- prefix being used for all Nascom and Nascom-compatible products. This sorry state of affairs continued for almost a year, during which the value of the Nascom company must have fallen tremendously. No development was taking place and (I have been told) there were only two Nascom employees left.
At this time, the whole Nascom "thing" was being kept going by a group of (ex) Nascom dealers. One of them even acted as postbox and paperwork centre for the newsletter previously run from the Nascom offices. (The newletter changed its name from INMC News to INMC80 News at this time to create a clean break from Nascom). The receiver appeared to have no interest in the NAS-BUS as a possible standard so the original specification was tidied up and renamed 80-BUS. Someone (possibly Dave Hunt, but it may also have been Dave Greenhalgh) instigated the design of a two-card system which could be used as a substitute for the NASCOM-2 if the receiver failed to find a buyer. This was to become the Gemini system. The new Gemini company was, once again, headed by John Marshall, who had been ousted from Nascom of course.
This was a very tense period for the NASCOM fans. If you already had a computer you were OK, but depended on your dealer for all support. If you were trying to get one then good luck! There were very few machines around. Expansion boards also became a problem. You couldn't expand a NASCOM-1 without a buffer board, and those were very hard to find.
Nascom was finally sold to Lucas Logic (August? 1981), being renamed Lucas Nascom. Guy Kewney commented in PCW when the acquisition was announced that he doubted that Lucas could operate this sort of business. He was to be proved right! At almost the same time the Gemini Multibus was launched. Now the user had a choice of systems on the same bus. However, the two systems differed in one very important aspect. The Gemini system was designed, from the beginning, to support the CP/M operating system. A new monitor program RP/M was written (by the same author as the Nascom monitors of course!) which let cassette-loaded CP/M programs run on a diskless system. Also, the two-board design allowed for a "proper" screen display system on the second board to allow CP/M programs to run correctly.
The NAS-BUS had been renamed 80-BUS by Gemini and (it says in 80-BUS news) some 10 manufacturers were producing over 20 bus-compatible cards between them. Probably because of its close affiliation, the old newsletter changed its name again. Now it became 80-BUS News as it was supporting both Nascom and Gemini systems.
Strangely enough (what a coincidence), August 1981 saw the launch of a new user magazine named Micropower. This appears to have been started by a software company, Program Power, who had been distributing Nascom software. So now we had two parallel systems and two magazines. Program Power and Lucas Logic versus 80-BUS News and Gemini/Microvalue.
In December 1981 Lucas Logic (I can't think of them as Nascom now) launched the NASCOM-3 rather quietly. It was a fully cased computer similar to the NASCOM-2 with 8k RAM. I say similar, as I have seen a report that the main board was different but I have never actually seen one to find out! Micropower changed its name to Nascom Newsletter in November 1982. I suspect that this was to give Lucas rather more control over it as some of the articles were drifting toward the 80-BUS!
Another computer was designed (It was seen at the 1982/83 "Which Computer" exhibition, but it definitely wasn't widely advertised or distributed). This had (bought-in) seperate cases for the keyboard, processor and monitor and *may* have gone under the name of "Nascom-LX". In reality it was another Nascom-2 with different expansion. It was aimed at the business market and was probably supplied with CP/M, Wordstar, Supercalc and dBaseII. It is quite possible that the exhibited model was either a dummy or a pre-production prototype.
Yet another machine was the "MicroEd" which was announced (about 1981/82) but which may or may not have gone into production. This was a Nascom-2 in a smaller box than the Nascom-3, without the expansion frame and fitted with 8kB of static RAM. It was intended as a competitor in the educational market.