UK Computers 1978 to 1989



Lucas Nascom 1

The Nascom 1 was a computer for early enthusiasts. Like most of the others of its day, this did not come with BASIC but a very simple system usually referred to as a bug (we computer nerds have such a sense of humour!), in this case NAS-BUG. The standard Nascom 1 came with a Z80 processor running at 2MHz, 2 Kilobytes of memory, split 1 KB for the computer and 1 KB for the screen output and a very simple keyboard able to enter characters from 0 to f (hexadecimal) plus STEP and GO into the computer. Despite this, and the high cost of £199 in kit form, the computer was expandable by a competent developer to 48 KB of memory, the addition of a proper keyboard and even floppy disks which were limited then to business computers. As well as adding BASIC, there were many other languages developed (including a version of Pascal that was the start of Borland Pascal, probably the best seller of its day). Even CP/M was produced which was the business operating system prior to MS-DOS (itself the predecessor to Windows 95).

I do not own a Nascom 1 though there are pictures of my Nascom 2