History of The Lynx
From CamputersLynx.info
The Lynx range of home computers were manufactured by Cambridge based start-up, Camputers Ltd, one of several small firms to spring up around the Cambridge area in the early 1980s, hoping to cash in on the success of Sinclair's ZX81 and ZX Spectrum computers.
The first machine, the Lynx 48K, was released in March 1983 as a home computer system to directly rival the Spectrum. The specification was rapidly upgraded to 96K in September 1983, and those who had bought a 48K system could send their machines back to Camputers to have the upgrade installed. This was one of the touted features of the Lynx range - easy expandability.
At the same time as the 96K Lynxes made it into the shops, the first Disk Drives were released. These were as stylish as the computer, finished in a business style dark grey, contained their own internal power supplies and had a then-substantial 200 kilobytes of storage capacity.
The disk drives were a significant development and offered the Lynx range a disk operating system which worked with, and expanded on, the Lynx's BASIC language.
In December, 1983, the Lynx 128K system was released. This sported a completely new motherboard, updated BASIC, a high resolution 80 column screen, and the CP/M 2.2 operating system using the standard disk drives. Whilst the 48K and 96K Lynxes used a Z80A microprocessor clocked at 4 MHz, the 128K used a 6 MHz Z80B microprocessor, giving a substantial speed improvement.
Whilst the range of computers and peripherals developed were very good, particularly the stylised modular design, Camputers were in big trouble and within 18 months of starting, the company went bust, in June 1984, owing over half a million pounds. The company's assets were taken over by another company, Anston Technology, but this too quickly folded without making any progress.
Reasons for Camputers' failure were manifold. The computers were, at £225, inherently over-priced going into a fiercely competitive and saturated market and particularly as it was clearly pitched to try and capture market share from the Sinclair Spectrum weighing in at only £99. So despite it being much classier than a Spectrum, very few machines were sold in the UK. Camputers were able to sell many more machines in Europe, particularly France, Spain and Greece.
The timing of the release of each Lynx model were so late as to have missed their own target markets - the 48K was a year late and should have made the shops in early 1982. The 128K machine should have been widely available by September 1983 but didn't actually come to light until January 1984, completely missing the Christmas 1983 market.
There was far too little software written for the Lynx range. Camputers, like so many rivals, under-invested in games and quality applications for the system. Without any so-called 'killer' applications there was little incentive to buy a Lynx in preference to any rival.
The final failing of Camputers, which was of their own making, was the lie of the boast of expandability. There was also an implication of compatibility. The 48K Lynx could be expanded to 96K, this was true, but only by returning the unit to the manufacturers, and even then it took them a 'long' time to do the upgrade, even though it was relatively simple. There was no route to expansion to 192K however, not for the 48K or the 96K, despite what it said on the box.
Some software which worked on a 48K Lynx didn't work when you got your Lynx back with the new 96K upgrade. Even worse was to follow when the 128K Lynx couldn't handle any 48K or 96K software without significant rewrites. This was due to the different internal architecture of the 128K from the 48K/96K and the BASIC operating system being rewritten in the 128K.
The 48K Lynx could not run the disk drives, not without being expanded to a 96K system first. And the 96K Lynx promised to deliver CP/M 2.2 with the disk drives but Camputers gave up and buried this idea.
Approximately 30,000 Lynx units were sold world-wide. It is estimated that 20-30% were sold in the UK, the rest in Europe, mainly in France, Spain and Greece.
Post-Camputers, third-party suppliers and groups tried hard to support the Lynx. Peripheral Products, based in Harrow, was run by Bob Jones, was a main Lynx dealer when all the main chains such as Dixons and Laskys had pulled out. Peripheral Products however, was soon also consumed through bearing the burden. Bob Jones somehow managed to acquire all the remaining liquidated stock from Camputers/Anston Technology. It is not clear whether this had anything to do with Peripheral Products going bust.
Before then though, Bob had started the Lynx User Group. With nearly 600 members he had done well to sign up about 10% of UK Lynx owners, the most active and loyal users still using their Lynxes. Bob's Lynx User Group released five A4 booklet magazines, the last of the set was a two-issues-in-one and took 3 or 4 years of nagging by the membership before he released it.
Before LUG, the first user group to support the Lynx was called the National Independent Lynx User Group (NILUG) and was run by Bob Poate. This group released six A4 magazines.
The Reading Lynx User Group was a small local group of enthusiasts who managed to achieve the innovation that eluded Camputers - that of installing CP/M 2.2 on a 96K Lynx Disk system in 40 column mode. The documentation was difficult to follow though and involved hardware changes to the 96K's motherboard. The group sold several copies of both the 40 column version and the 80 column version for respectivly £10 and £15. The group also sold an extension ROM for the 96K Lynx called Scorpion.
The Lynx Revival Group, started in 1988, tried to revive activity in the Lynx by offering a public domain disk format release. A small group of contributors managed to submit many innovative projects, some of which put Camputers to shame. Following the style of the groups before it, LRG released 6 public domain disks over a 3 year period before renaming itself to the Lynx Disk User Group. LDUG produced a further two public domain disks before interest finally fizzled out in 1992.
Interesting hardware developments were produced by talented individuals and included a 64KB Bank 4 RAM board for the 128K Lynx, a voice recording system, parallel user ports, speech synthesizer, modem, and an incredible SCSI Hard Disk, implemented as Drive E: and having a whopping 170MB of capacity.
A number of software titles released by Camputers and third party suppliers and a limited number of books, journal, and magazine articles, in addition to the limited computers and peripherals sold make the Lynx a highly collectible piece of computer memorabilia. Searches on the internet reveal that Lynx computers and peripherals appear to command very high prices compared to their more successful rivals from the early 1980s.
For those that actually used their Lynxes for programming, development, or playing games or using CP/M, the Lynx was a graceful, versatile machine which deserved to be far more successful than it was. While computers of today continue to get ever faster with bigger memories, hard disks, screens and internet, the Lynx will be remembered fondly by the few that had one, used one, and programmed one.
