Martyn Smith

From CamputersLynx.info

Martyn Smith 1967 - 2006 aged 38 Written by Russell K. Davis

I only knew Martyn for just about a year and to my knowledge never met him in person although we both thought that we might have said hello in passing at either Bob Jones's house or Chris Mathews's both of whom we used to visit and often when others were coming or going.

When I was first setting up this site Martyn's was the second email I recieved. It was Martyn that told me that the Lynx still had a loyal following long after i'd left the fold and still had people developing hardware and software for it well into the 90s. It was Martyn that put me in contact with the remaining members of the Famous Reading Lynx User Group, It was Martyn who first sent me items to put on the site that hadn't either come from the small stash i'd managed to get from Witchy of Binary Dinosaurs, from Pete Todd of PALE or from exhorbitantly priced internet based stores that included exhorbitant shipping costs.

Martyn designed a SCSI controller for the Lynx to allow a small SCSI harddisk to be used with Lynx, Reverse engineering LynxDos and writing a patch to allow for harddisk operations. He also did some work for Bob Jones adding some new commands to Lynx BASIC, ON GOTO/ON GOSUB to name a couple and also started a newsletter, The LDUG Newsletter. Although only 1 issue and 6 copies were ever produced.

Once Martyn had gotten in touch with me I suddenly discovered his name in the credits on many retro computer sites, there didn't seem to be any British Home micro from the 1980s that he didn't at least have a tape for, a magazine article about or a book about and he was willing to share whatever information he had with others, which unfortunatly in this day and age is all too rare.

Without Martyn this site (and many others) would be not be half the site it is. he will be sadly missed.