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Taken sometime in 1984 when part of the Dragon team had moved on to Thorn EMI to create the Liberator hand-held computer.

Left to Right - Duncan Smeed (original Dragon ROM BIOS developer and head of software), Jan Wojna (worked on Dragon hardware), John Linney (worked on Dragon system software), John Peacock (finance), Derek Williams (Managing Director)

Thorn EMI Liberator
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Thorn EMI Liberator
DeveloperThorn EMI Datatech
TypePortable computer
Release date1985
DiscontinuedSeptember 1986
Operating systemCP/M
CPUZilog Z80A
Memory40 kB of internal RAM as standard
GraphicsLCD (480 x 128 pixels)/ (80 columns by 16 lines of text)
The Thorn EMI Liberator was a laptop word processor, produced in the United Kingdom by Thorn EMI Datatech, then in Feltham Middlesex, primarily intended for use by UK Government civil servants. Released in 1985, it is considered to be the first mass-produced British laptop. Thorn EMI Datatech simultaneously held the contracts for the repair of the Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81.


History
The design of the Liberator was instigated in 1983 by the UK Government's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA). It was envisaged as a portable device to allow civil servants to write and print their own reports, rather than using the services of typists. The CCTA initially contacted Dragon Data to develop the product, but the company went into administration shortly afterwards, and the engineering team were taken on by Thorn EMI to continue the project in 1984.

The Liberator entered limited production in early 1985 and was officially launched in September of that year, with PR from Aspect Public Relations. The journalist launch was the first promotional event held in the Cabinet War Rooms.

Despite plans for improved Liberator Mk1A and Mk2 variants, production of the Liberator ended in September 1986.

Description
The Liberator was based on a Zilog Z80A microprocessor and a Gate array implementing the screen controller, keyboard interface and other I/O logic. The LCD display had a resolution of 480 x 128 pixels, or 80 columns by 16 lines of text. Interfaces comprised two S5/8 serial ports and two expansion buses, one specifically for extra RAM. Two battery packs were available, a NiCad rechargeable pack giving 12 hours operation, or one holding four AA cells giving 16 hours. The Liberator had 40 kB of internal RAM as standard, plus an optional 24 kB which could be write-protected by means of an external switch and had its own button cell battery to provide non-volatile storage. Another 24 kB of non-volatile RAM could be plugged into the external RAM expansion bus.

The Liberator's custom wordprocessing software ran under the CP/M operating system.

The external dimensions of the Liberator were 295 x 252 x 35mm.

In November 2012, I wrote and published the definitive history of the Thorn EMI Liberator, the first British laptop computer, over at The Register. I’d never even heard of the machine when I first saw a picture of it. I spotted the snap while researching the story of the Dragon 32 – some of the Dragon engineers went on to develop the Liberator after Dragon Data, by then a subsidiary of electrical industry giant GEC, was closed down.

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The Liberator in action
I talked to the Liberator’s hardware and software engineers, their bosses and to Bernard Terry, the former civil servant who had the idea for a portable device for text processing in the first place. I even got to see a real Liberator, courtesy of the Science Museum in London, which has one in its collection, though not on public display. That’s a shame, given the Liberator is an example of pioneering British technology. More to the point, I wasn’t able to turn it on and try it out.
Since I wrote the Liberator’s story, I’ve had a couple of offers of old machines, most recently from Brian Whitefield, a one-time worker at Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO) and a member of the British Standards Technical Committee on micrographics, a body on which Bernard Terry also sat. Brian very generously offered to send me his Liberator, long tucked away in a cupboard and unused, so I could see what it had been like in action back in 1985 when it first went on sale.
The Liberator is a little larger than a sheet of A4 paper and just over an inch thick. Two grey clips on the sides release the half-width lid, which reveals the screen and the keyboard. The screen is an 80-character by 16-line LCD, with letter- and line-count markings printed on the bezel. There are also two margin markers: one at 66 characters, the other at 76. These showed the end of the line for documents to printed out on dot-matrix and daisywheel printers with, respectively, ten and 12 characters per inch fonts.

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The screen is very reflective and proved hard to shoot


Although the Liberator is a full Z80A-based computer, Bernard Terry always wanted it to be a mobile text editor rather than a general-purpose machine, so it boots straight into its work processing software, Wordcom. As someone who has been using text editor and word processors for more than a quarter of a century, I can say the Liberator isn’t the most feature-rich editor there has ever been, but there’s not a lot I can’t do with it. There’s no spelling or grammar checker, for instance – senior civil servants were expected to know all that – but there is a cut and paste system which also works across files.
The keyboard has a key marked MARK. Tap it once and you can use the four cursor keys to highlight a section of text. Hit MARK again, and a menu of options appears on the right side of the screen, among them Copy, Cut and Delete commands. A line of selection-sensitive help text appears at the top of the screen to tell you what each menu item does. The Liberator was driven using this contextual menu, activated at other times by a tap of the machine’s large, blue BREAK CMD key.

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A close-up of the monochrome dot-matrix LCD
Extra symbols can be entered using the ALT key – hold it down and tap one of the number keys to get the symbol. A chart just below the screen hinge lists them all. The ESC key is also a modifier, but one not necessary to hold down. Tap B or U and you’ll mark the following characters as bold or underlined – ESC and then N put the text back to normal. Curiously, the B marker appears in bold on the screen, but the characters that follow it don’t – likewise underlined text. Not enough space in the character set Rom for bold and underlined character glyphs, presumably.
There are no super- or sub-script characters, and no italics. This is not a WYSIWYG word processor. And with no word count, table of contents page and index generation, or page number insertion, it’s not for writing ready-to-print books, either. But then it never was. The Liberator was a text drafting tool, not a device for document preparation. It’s not a DTP system. It does support multi-page documents, though.

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The keyboard: note the forward and backward delete keys; the blue command key; and the Mark key for cut’n’paste operations
The Liberator’s keyboard has both forward and backward delete keys, and while the editor starts in insert mode, a tap of the O’WRT button gets you overwriting characters. Use SHIFT and CTRL to delete whole words or remaining sections of lines at once, or to modify how far a press of one of the cursor buttons takes you.
Hit the CMND key and up pops a document-level menu over on the right side of the screen. One of the options is MENU, which takes you to the file-handling UI: a list of filenames on the left and the main menu in the right-most column. Files can be created, renamed, deleted, write-protected printed or, through the UTILITY sub-menu, sent through the liberator’s serial ports – of a bizarre type called S5/8 (Serial 5 Volt, 8-pin) – to another machine.

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Expansion! Add software modules and other add-ons here
Like a modern iPad or phone, the Liberator powers up almost instantaneously, and takes you right to where you left off. There’s no on-off switch, or Shutdown command, and the Power button is a spring-loaded switch triggered by opening and closing the lid. It would be years before notebook computers gained this kind of sleep functionality. To save battery power, the screen powers off after ten minutes – just push the power button to bring it back to life.
With no hard drive on board, all you have for storage is memory, backed up with the on-board battery. Separate add-on Ram packs had their own button batteries to preserve their contents. For the main memory, there’s a built-in back-up NiCad cell fitted onto the motherboard and so not readily accessible.

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The carry handle doubles as a screen rest…

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…or folds down to raise the back of the computer

Incidentally, the Liberator was clearly never intended for a long life. It’s not Y2K compliant, for a start – only two digits were used to store the year in the machine’s settings file.
Thorn EMI quoted a battery life of 14 hours with the bundled rechargeable battery pack, but it also offered a replacement pack that could take four alkaline AA cells, which is what I’m running this Liberator off. While the machine will begin to bleep at you and pop up a warning when the charge gets close to depletion, there’s no on-screen power charge level readout of the kind we take for granted today with laptops, tablets and phones.

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The main menu. Note the year is 1913 – the Liberator wasn’t Y2K compliant of course
We’re now accustomed to a different kind of keyboard too. The Liberator’s keyboard is solid enough, if rattly – more on the woeful 1980s build quality in a moment – with a decent travel, but requires a more decisive press than modern, low-movement keyboards do. It auto-repeats, but the time the system waits before repeating the pressed key is very short, so I kept getting pairs of characters rather than one. Another quirk: scrolling up or down with arrow keys works, but doesn’t (eventually) take you to the start or end of the text, only to the first or last line. Unless you press the CTRL key while doing so, as this takes you to the line end automatically.
Setting up the Liberator’s date and time is easy, but if you make a mistake you have to start all over again.

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The battery bay and the port array: two serials and a memory slot. Note the warped casing above it. 1980s manufacturing, eh?
Two things strike me about the Liberator as a physical unit: quite how yellow old plastic goes – inside the battery compartment away from the light, it’s a pleasant light grey – and how poorly plastic was once moulded. For an ‘executive’ machine, the Liberator is rather rough. The serial port DIN sockets a well to the right of the centre of the holes cut in the case for them. Parts of the case were curved during moulding, the spring-loaded cover over the expansion port is loose and doesn’t fill the gap fully.

Of course, computer makers didn’t have CAD then – or at least they lacked computer controlled cutting rigs to create the master moulds. Compared to today’s precision manufacturing techniques, the Liberator assembly process seems very low-tech.

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Highlight text to delete it en masse, or add it to the paste buffer. Note the ‘pop-up’ menu on the right and the context-sensitive help text on the top line
But that’s what manufacturing was like 30-odd years ago. You can’t blame the engineers for that. Or for the LCD screen’s reflectivity or limited contrast – that was the nature of the beast in the mid-1980s. You can blame them for not putting a proper hinge in the lid – though perhaps that would have added too much cost. The Liberator’s screen hinges on a strip of thin, scored plastic, so it will only lie flat on the back of the computer. Fortunately, the retractable carry handle the engineers built onto the back of the Liberator can be folded over the top of the machine to keep the screen at an angle, as you can see from the photos above.
You need good light, but not direct illumination because of screen’s very glossy face. There’s no backlight, just a (large) contrast control handily placed right next to the keyboard. Even then it can be hard to see – large-size LCD technology was in its infancy back then, though as big a screen as possible was something Bernard Terry insisted upon in his original specification. It’s a passive-matrix panel, of course – no active-matrix, aka TFT (Thin-Film Transistor) LCD screens back then, certainly not at the price point of a mass-market computer. Apart from having a very limited viewing angle, if you move the cursor too quickly and it will ‘submarine’ – it’ll momentarily disappear, hidden by the low refresh rate of the screen.

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The Liberator’s display has a pixel resolution of 480 x 128, with each character fitted into a 6 x 8 space, though the right-most column and bottom lines are kept clear. So, no graphics then and, with the Liberator’s emphasis on serious text processing, there are no frivolous graphical glyphs in the character set of the kind you could have fun with on Commodore’s Pet, say. A curious quirk: double-quote marks represented not as the usual “ and ” but as ‘’ and ‘’ – so one glyph for both. Again, a character set restriction, this time a result of being limited to the Ascii (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard.
The whole lot weighs 1.7kg without batteries, so it’s no lightweight but less than many a modern 15-inch laptop – and a lot less than the similarly styled 1989 Zenith Minisport ZL-1 I found myself using in the early 1990s. The ZL-1 was almost 3kg. The Liberator even came with a natty vinyl shoulder bag – surely one of the world’s first dedicated laptop bags, if not the very first.
Verdict
You can turn your nose up at the Liberator’s poor manufacturing quality, its limited storage – no hard drive here – its hard-to-read, un-backlit LCD, and its unattractive angular design, but these really just show that the Liberator was a product of its time. The graphical user interface had yet to establish itself as the standard – most users worked with text-based UIs, of the kind the Liberator presents. If its text editing software is less capable than the early versions of WordStar and Word Perfect then available, that was deliberately done. Bernard Terry was adamant that too much functionality would be counter-productive: it would put non-technical, computer illiterate civil servants off using the device. The Liberator had to be simple – easy to use, quick to learn. And it is.

The Liberator is unquestionably a machine I could still use for writing on the move. Only its lack of wireless data communication – science fiction back in the mid 1980s – limits its use. Of course, I wouldn’t swap it for my two-year-old 11-inch MacBook Air, which is far more portable and much more capable, but that’s progress.
The Liberator was a ground-breaking product. It wasn’t the first mobile computer, or the first laptop, but it was the first of the latter to be affordable – it cost £567; £1340 in today’s money, based on Retail Price Index inflation – and the first designed and manufactured in the UK. It deserved to succeed, but was ultimately beaten not by Toshiba’s better-remembered laptop computers – which cost around £1000 back then, equivalent to £2360 now – but by the rapid rise of the MS-DOS desktop computer. Just as Bernard Terry was conceiving an easy-to-use introduction to information technology for people who’d never used a computer before, other people were envisaging a PC on every desk, each able to run a variety of applications. Their vision proved the dominant one, though they never considered the fearsome learning curve for non-techies the way Terry did.
The Register’s History of the Liberator: Part One, Part Two and Part Three


Jonathan S Farley
May 25, 2013 at 8:02 pm
I wrote my MA dissertation on my Liberator, which I still have. The rechargeable battery died in the mid 90s, so I dismantled it and rebuilt it with new cells that had a higher capacity . By 1998, the keyboard was glitching. I took it apart and found the circuit board underneath was cracked. I soldered bridges across the cracks and sculpted a foam support to go underneath and stop it from flexing with every keypress. In 2003 I traveled from Heathrow to Chicago. Most people on the flight were turned their laptops off after 40 minutes. I typed from takeoff to landing on one charge with the Liberator. I haven’t used it since then but I guess it will still work if I power it up.
Reply ↓



Daniel Beardsmore
June 22, 2014 at 9:36 pm
I was researching the Dragon 32/64/Tano keyboards and came across an interesting photo on Google Images (one of those above) — the Liberator, with what seemed to be RAFI keycaps for RS 74 M low-travel switches. I did a bit of digging — your Register article thankfully depicted a couple of Liberator keyboards with (inexplicably) missing keycaps, clearly showing the RAFI RS 74 M switches.
I’ve documented the switches in detail here, and I’ve added a reference back to El Reg for the photos showing the same switches in the Liberator:
http://deskthority.net/wiki/RAFI_RS_74_M
(Hopefully the article and its photos won’t disappear in a few years!)
I am not sure I would want to type on a keyboard with these switches in — they’re too stiff for their short travel, and not at all comfortable. I imagine we had better relations with Germany than Japan in the 80s, as Japan had far more suitable switches than Germany did.


Liberator: the untold story of the first British laptop part 1
Taking over the typing pool

Archaeologic In 1985, the UK home computer boom was over. Those computer manufacturers who had survived the sales wasteland that was Christmas 1984 quickly began to turn their attention away from the home users they had courted through the first half of the 1980s to the growing and potentially much more lucrative business market.
The IBM PC had been launched four years earlier, in 1981. The 5150 and the clones it had inspired at Compaq and other computing firms new and established were winning an increasing share of the market. Some British manufacturers were content to follow the American lead and offer clones of their own. Others, however, believed they could win with systems of their own design.

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The Thorn EMI Liberator: the first British laptop
Time would show they were wrong, that what business wanted more than anything was standardisation and, more importantly, the cost savings that came with it. Other buyers wanted ultra-low cost computing. But in the mid-1980s many of Britain’s computer companies had established themselves in a market where numerous, often incompatible home micros successfully co-existed, each with its own ecosystem of software and add-ons. They believed business buyers would be happy with this world too.
Perhaps the most famous example, Sinclair’s Quantum Leap, or QL, flopped, and so did many, many others. Few are remembered today. Among the forgotten is the Thorn EMI Liberator, named not for the starship featured in the first three seasons of the then-popular BBC TV sci-fi show Blake’s 7 but for its ability to free workers from their desks and allow them to work on the move.
Little known now - it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry - the Liberator was the UK’s first home-grown laptop computer.

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Designed for civil servants
It wasn’t the first portable computer, or even the first British mobile machine - Epson’s HX-20 and the Grundy NewBrain claim those honours. It wasn't the first laptop: for that look to the US-made GRiD Compass. But the Liberator was the first notebook computer created in Britain that would be recognisable as such to users of today’s portable PCs. It sported the now familiar clamshell design. Closing the lid put it to sleep; opening it not only brought back the power, but put the user back exactly where they had previously left off working.
And this major innovation in mobile computing was created for that most conservative of worker, the British civil servant.
The machine that was to become the Liberator was devised by a civil servant too. It was designed to solve a very particular problem: the delay imposed upon civil servants by the established workflow for written communications. In an era before email when all formal correspondence had to be in writing, civil servants who might, say, reach an agreement on a course of action during a phone call would nevertheless have to confirm the plan in a formal letter. They would jot down or dictate the gist of the message, which would then be sent off to the typing pool to be written up neatly. This took time, doubly so if a latter needed to go back to the typists for corrections or amendments. In the meantime, no one could proceed until they had all the right paperwork.

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As a Principal Systems Analyst and Designer, Bernard Terry - called by some "Britain's father of the laptop" - realised that putting text editing tools into the hands of his colleagues could eliminate the delay. He also knew that many civil servants, especially the more senior ones, were highly resistant to new ways of working. These were men who relied upon secretaries to do the typing and filing for them. These knowledge workers didn't need a fancy new typewriter, something that they would perceive as a way to get them to do the work lower grades were employed for, but a device which would allow them to take charge of the creative process.
This device, then, would not be pitched as a ‘word processor’, at that time a term for an electronic typewriter with its own memory and storage, and a machine for secretaries and the typing pool. Nor would it be promoted as a ‘computer’, a device viewed as a tool for the mechanics in the IT department not civil service decision makers. Instead, it would be a ‘portable text processor’, a gadget on which the enterprising civil servant could create the drafts he or she would then pass on to others for printing and posting.
At the time, Terry was working for the CCTA, the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency, a body established to provide government departments with guidance on the use of information technology equipment.

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The CCTA was formed in March 1972 by the then Conservative government as the Central Computer Agency. The Heath administration had accepted the findings of the Select Committee on Science and Technology, published in October 1971, that government needed a more joined-up approach to IT implementation. The CCA combined a number of government departments’ IT operations: the Computer Procurement Division and the Central Computer Bureau of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO), the government's office equipment supplier; the Technical Support Unit of the Department of Trade and Industry; and the Civil Service’s own Management Services (Computers) Division, which was already managing a number of large IT projects on behalf of the Treasury.
The CCA became the CCTA in 1979. Two years later, the Treasury would take control of the CCTA, and it was here that Bernard Terry was given the go-ahead by the CCTA's Director, Reay Atkinson, to find just such a text processor as he had envisaged.
Field trials
The first step, Terry recalls, was to find out if such a machine already existed. Now long retired but still spritely, the 85-year-old Terry told me he began to work through all the portable devices then on the market, almost all of them coming out of Japan, evaluating each as a possible basis for the Civil Service machine. Most were found wanting: they were either far too bulky or too small, the latter also lacking sufficient storage for the volume of documents a civil servant might be expected to produce, equipped with only tiny screens and unfriendly calculator-style keyboards.

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Would-be Liberators: (L-R) Tandy's TRS-80 Model 100 and Olivetti's M10, both made by Kyocera
With no stand-out contender, Terry decided to field-trial some of the existing machines. The selection criteria were an A4 footprint, a reasonable weight of around 4lbs (1.8kg) and a thickness no greater than 1.25in (31.3mm) to ensure it would fit into a Civil Service-standard briefcase. Three machines were chosen: the NEC 8210A, the Olivetti M10 and the Tandy TRS Model 100, all produced to the same broad template by Japanese manufacturer Kyocera. Terry was granted sufficient budget - £30,000 - to buy five each of these portables, plus peripherals and to conduct the evaluation. The machines were put in the hands of volunteers from within the CCTA and a number of other government departments, including the Department for Health and Social Security, the Department of Trade and Industry, the Department of Education and Science, the Department of Health and Social Security, and the Ministry of Defence, across a range of Civil Service grades.
The nine-month trial, run by CCTA employee Gordon Lawrence, kicked off in 1983 and quickly demonstrated that Bernard Terry's initial notion was correct: that report-writing civil servants could not only be made more productive if given a portable text editor, but also that the device reduced the time taken to go from rough draft to finished document. The study revealed that senior civil servants could save almost three hours a week by using a portable machine for text preparation. A £750 machine would have paid for itself in six months, it was calculated.
The users were keen too: in the early days, two-thirds of triallists said they thought the machines had potential. By the end of the evaluation, five out of six thought that was the case.

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Who needs kneetops? The CCTA's 1983-84 survey showed rather a lot of knowledge workers did
However, the test also showed that none of the products evaluated quite met their users' needs. Beyond problems getting printers connected and then working, they emphasised file juggling with the operating system or Basic programming over how specific tasks might be achieved. In short, says Terry, they were designed for computer buffs, not for workers needing to get a job done. The programs themselves often contained more features than were actually needed and so appeared intimidatingly complicated to the non-technical users of the time.
Terry approached a number of vendors with the results of the evaluation, but they showed no willingness or interest in adjusting their products - or devising new ones - on the back of this feedback.
There was nothing for it. With no existing machine exactly meeting Terry’s trial-tested requirements, and with vendors unwilling to adapt to them, the CCTA would have to oversee the creation of a machine of its own.

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'Could hardly be further from the ideal' - The Public Service Working Party (PSWP) dismisses the Centronics and RS-232 ports
Terry was able to persuade the CCTA’s powers-that-be to grant him sufficient funding to initiate a development project: a UK company would be selected to build a prototype text editor under CCTA oversight, but would be able to release the final machine as a commercial product. Not only would the early work be funded by government, but the Civil Service would be there as a ready made market for the machine. Terry was instructed to prepare a broad specification for the device.
More than a quarter of a century on, Bernard Terry doesn’t recall approaching companies with whom he might develop the proposed text editor. As he remembers it, it was Reay Atkinson who had a contact in Thorn EMI's management through whom the company was eventually brought on board. "The next thing I knew, I was called into a meeting with the director of Thorn EMI and told they were interested in making the machine if I thought there was a market in the Civil Service," he remembers.
However, CCTA documentation from the time suggests the organisation, with the help of the Department of Trade and Industry, approached a number of UK computer and electronics manufacturers to sound them out as potential participants in the project.

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Thorn EMI had certainly agreed to take part by September 1984, when an article penned by Andrew Hardie, who was Research Director of Oval Automation and Technical Consultant to a civil service advisory body called the Public Service Working Party (PSWP), alluded to the CCTA's "recent trial of A4-sized portable microcomputers, or ‘kneetops’ as they are referred to within the CCTA" and the organisation's "involvement with a major British manufacturer in the design and development of a new UK ‘kneetop’."
Hardie would would soon become closely involved with the Liberator project, initially working with Bernard Terry as a consultant to Thorn EMI's IT marketing team, later as a supplier of third-party peripherals for the devices, and eventually as a seller of the laptop’s word processing software on other platforms.
Finding a manufacturer
It isn’t known how many other British manufacturers the CCTA and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) approached, but one of them was certainly Dragon Data, the financially troubled maker of the Dragon 32 and Dragon 64 home computers. By the time the CCTA first talked to Dragon, the company had been bought from its founding parent, Mettoy, by the UK electricals and electronics giant GEC.
After the release of the Dragon 32, the Wales-based Dragon Data had established a nascent R&D team under its Technical Director, Derek Williams. Its task: to begin creating the next-generation products that would follow the 32 and its stop-gap upgrade, the Dragon 64. The Dragon 32 had been designed by a third-party consultancy; Dragon Data management wanted this crucial work and the expertise it required brought in house.

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The Dragon Portable that might have been: Convergent Technologies' WorkSlate
Source: Bruce Damer/DigiBarn Computer Museum

Williams was tasked with seeking out new opportunities for Dragon and while travelling in the States in early 1984 his attention had been drawn to a machine spotted on the front cover of a magazine: Convergent Technologies’ WorkState, a machine not unlike Epson’s HX-20 but based on the Motorola 6800 processor family, as was the Dragon. It was designed less as a general-purpose computer more as a mobile spreadsheet - a numerical version of the text processor Bernard Terry was pondering back home. Williams was impressed by the WorkSlate’s potential as an easy-to-use device for business people, and realised it would fit very nicely into Dragon’s product line.
“I came back to the UK to find a letter on my desk from the CCTA, which was looking for a British company to make a portable text processor for the Civil Service,” Williams told me. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing - the WorkSlate could be exactly what they’re looking for’. So I organised a meeting, went up to London and met Bernard Terry.”
It didn’t go quite as Williams had expected. “I outlined how I felt the WorkSlate could fulfil the need the CCTA had. Bernard was pretty solemn-faced throughout my presentation, and then he proceeded to just about wipe the floor with me, telling me everything that was wrong with the WorkSlate. I was just about to say ‘thank you very much’ and go when he said, ‘Now I’ll tell you what’s right with it’.”
Williams took Terry’s comments on board and promised to come up with a spec for a machine that would fit the bill. “And that’s what I did,” he recalls. “It took about two or three weeks, and I came with a spec which I discussed with Bernard, and he said, ‘Yes, this is something we can take forward’.”

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Dragon Data's former R&D team, then at Thorn EMI, on the completion of the Liberator laptop:
(L-R) Duncan Smeed, Jan Wojna, John Linney, John Peacock and Derek Williams
Source: John Linney
At the same time, of course, the Dragon R&D team was working on other, rather more important, more concrete projects too, including a dual-processor Dragon for business users. But this was never completed: Dragon Data, by now renamed GEC Dragon, was declared unsustainable by GEC bosses and put into administration in May 1984.
Past histories of Dragon have often mentioned an unnamed portable that was intended to be pitched to business buyers. This is almost certainly a distorted mix of the WorkSlate brought home by Derek Williams and the CCTA machine the Dragon team was asked to consider.
After his meetings with Bernard Terry, Derek Williams was all fired up to persuade Dragon's management to take on the CCTA contract. The collapse of GEC Dragon put an end to that, but Williams was enterprising enough to realise that even though Dragon was no more, the company's tightly knit R&D team had the exactly right expertise to take on the CCTA project, left hanging by the closure. Williams and John Peacock, Dragon's Finance Director, began exploring how to make this happen.
One of the Dragon R&D team’s software engineers, John Linney, recalls that Williams and Peacock initially hoped to form a new company to tackle the government project. Local money men and venture capitalists were approached, Peacock remembers, but none were keen to invest in the then troubled computer business. He and Williams also approached electronics companies, such as Race, but without success.

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The Liberator prototype - then dubbed the 'Management Aid Tool'
Source: Bernard Terry
In the end, it was an industrial giant, the guns-to-music combine Thorn EMI, which took Derek Williams’ engineering team - Linney, hardware engineer Jan Wojna and Dragon software chief Duncan Smeed - under its wing. They would report directly to Williams as technical lead. John Peacock would manage the machine's component suppliers and cashflow.
"We were introduced to Thorn EMI by Bernard Terry," remembers Peacock. "We told about Thorn on Monday, met them on Thursday and started work the following Monday," he says.
The Dragon team sets to work
The DTI, through its interest in seeking a future for the former GEC Dragon plant in South Wales, also helped bring Thorn EMI and Williams' group together, in the summer of 1984. That's how Williams remembers it - he and Peacock met a DTI representative in a motorway service station near the Severn Bridge, half way between London and South Wales, and the government man suggested they approach Thorn EMI. The DTI later gave Thorn EMI a "support for innovation" grant to support its bid for the CCTA contract.
A few days later, Williams and Peacock were invited to meet Colin Southgate, then Group MD of Thorn EMI's IT division. "So we went down, met him, told the whole story and went through some budget projections and he said, 'yes'. He was one of those guys who make decisions very quickly, and he said in that meeting, 'I'm going to hire you'."
"The attraction to Thorn was they they were inheriting not a group of individuals but a team that had all the required disciplines to take on a project like the Liberator," recalls Jan Wojna.

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It lives!
Source: Bernard Terry
"We were an unusual team," adds Derek Williams. "You wouldn't normally have someone like John Peacock, who's a chartered accountant, involved in the development group like this. But John has many other skills apart from financial. He's a really good wheeler dealer is John, and so he basically managed the purchasing side of things. John was very innovative in getting the cost of components down."
There was, Wojna remembers, a small period between Dragon's collapse and work on the new machine commencing at Thorn EMI - including the time taken to establish a development lab - but then "once all the basics had been sorted out - accommodation and things like that - it was a case of working out how we were going to turn this into a reality: what we need from the hardware, what we need from the software, what are the constraints, what are the requirements and what's the current technology available that would help us achieve that."
Thorn EMI itself the advantage of a presence in South Wales. And its plant in Treorchy, Glamorgan was under threat: by the early 1980s it was punching out dials for rotary phones - the operation was called Thorn EMI Dynatel - but was being undercut by Taiwanese rivals, as was so much of British manufacturing at that time. The factory might close, but if the proposed mobile text processor could be produced there, workers' jobs would be saved.

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Liberator powerhouse: Zilog's Z80A
Source: Quickfix/Wikimedia

Financially, the CCTA text editor project was easy for Thorn EMI to accept, says John Peacock, because it was low risk. It could afford to chance "half a million quid and, in the end, more like £350,000 after the government grant" on the project going awry.
Whether it was DTI civil servants concerned by rising unemployment in the area; Thorn EMI's ability to persuade the CCTA that, with Derek Williams' team on board, it was best placed to deliver the mobile computer on time and on budget; Williams and Peacock's entrepreneurial chutzpah; or a mixture of all these factors, in August 1984, the CCTA gave Thorn EMI the go-ahead to design the Liberator and manufacture it at Treorchy.
Had GEC Dragon survived, the engineers might have considered basing the new machine on the technology they were preparing for future Dragon computers: the Motorola 6809E processor and its fully 16-bit successors, and Microware's Unix-like OS-9 operating system. At Thorn EMI, however, the team started afresh. Bernard Terry had already provided a broad statement of the problem they needed to solve - devise a text processing system civil servants could use to create documents away from their desks and later print out those documents - and it was up to them to spec up and create the machine.

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The prototype's keyboard
The were given very little time to do so. Peacock, Linney, Wojna and Smeed all separately recall Derek Williams promising Thorn EMI chiefs that he and his team would have the prototype up and running within six months - a timetable pointing to completion by January 1985, at which point the CCTA was expecting to take possession of an initial 40 units. The pledge was treated with some skepticism by the powers that be, but it was one that the team, fuelled by coffee, adrenalin and a youthful drive to succeed, were able to make good.
At the time, the best choice for a low-power processor - clearly an essential requirement for a battery powered machine intended to free users from being permanently tethered to a power supply - was Zilog's ageing Z80A. John Linney recalls that other, more advanced microprocessors were briefly considered, including the Intel 8088 used in the IBM PC, but quickly rejected because of their relatively high power consumption.
"The Z80A could be put into a very low-power mode and [you could] wake it up with an interrupt," recalls Jan Wojna. "Whenever possible, we put the whole thing into this low-power mode or make it run more slowly."

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The label says Digital Research, and the OS was CP/M, but using the Liberator, you'd have never known it
As the original Liberator Technical/Service Manual notes: "Great care has been taken both in software and hardware to keep the operating, standby and backup power consumption to a minimum, eg. in the operating mode the Z80 spends inactive periods in a 'halt' state (min. power consumption state, supply current about 65mA), when in standby mode power is disconnected from the Z80 system and the I/O processor is put in a 'sleep' condition (supply current <1mA)."
With the processor selected, the operating system effectively chose itself, says Linney. The team could have built one afresh, but it was easier and, crucially, less time-consuming to license one. For the Z80A, the only real choice was Digital Research's CP/M. ®
Archaeologic It is 1984 and Bernard Terry, a civil servant, has devised a 'portable text processor' to make his fellow civil servants more productive in the office and out. Electronics giant Thorn EMI has agreed to manufacturer the machine, which will eventually be called the Liberator and become Britain's first laptop computer. Thorn has taken on the R&D team from the collapsed Dragon Data to design the Liberator. For all the details, check out Part One of the Liberator story.
Now read on...

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The Thorn EMI Liberator
Another important hardware design choice to be made was the new machine's mobile power source. A battery, of course - but what type of battery? Today, designers would unthinkingly adopt a rechargeable, but that wasn't such an obvious move back then, Liberator hardware engineer Jan Wojna remembers. He did design a NiCad battery pack and it was offered as an accessory for the Liberator, but the prime mobile power pack would be a box - to make it interchangeable with the rechargeable unit - into which the user could slot four AA cells.
"Using rechargeables created all sorts of design problems," says Wojna, "because of the very wide variation in output voltage that you'd get from a batter pack when it was fully charged and the curve that you got as it discharged, requiring you to initially reduce the voltage and when it dropped below a certain voltage invert it back up again to keep it at a steady 5V. That was actually one of the main challenges."
The AA pack - model number LABH1040 - offered better runtime than the LRBP1030 NiCad battery did. It could keep the portable operational for 16 hours; the rechargeable unit would give you just 12 hours’ work time.

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From the Technical Manual: from the motherboard schematic...
This was early, innovative work in the field of mobile device power management. Plenty of effort went in to getting it right, Wojna recalls. "No matter how good everything else might have been, if you couldn't get a decent battery life out of your pack, you didn't have a solution."
Another challenge: space. One of the key design decisions, says Wojna, was to integrate as much of the electronics as possible into a single integrated circuit - not easy given the "quite primitive" tools available to enable such integration. With this custom silicon housing all the hardware controllers - keyboard, screen, I/O etc - Wojna didn’t have to fit much else onto the motherboard other than the processor and the memory.
It’s a sign of the difficulty in designing a complex IC in those days that this component was one of the last Liberator parts to be completed. It was built out of a California Micro Devices - now On Semiconductor - Field-Programbale Gate Array (FPGA). Wojna says four sample chips finally arrived from the foundry right before Christmas 1984. He and design team director Derek Williams couldn't wait to try them and sneaked away from families and into the office on Boxing Day to test the chips. The first was fitted into the prototype. The Liberator failed to boot. Spirits fell. Had the team got the design wrong? If so, could it be fixed and new silicon produced in time to meet the tight six-month development deadline Williams had encouraged Thorn EMI management to set?

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...to the top of the clamshell...
There was much relief, then, when the second chip was put in in place of the first, and the machine started up and worked as planned. "It was a duff chip - it did nothing. All the other three worked perfectly."
Another innovation: using piggy-back sockets for the Liberator's S-Ram chips, a solution leapt upon as the only way to get all the necessary chips onto a board that had to be sufficiently small to fit into an A4-footprint case. The problem, however, was that no one was selling the sockets in the UK, says Williams, so the team bought direct from a US supplier. That caused some friction, he recalls, with Thorn EMI's huge, centralised, highly bureaucratic and jealous of its role purchasing department. Allow small, fast-moving operations to do their own buying? Well, that's it's not how it's done here.
"We had to break every rule in their book to get this thing developed on time," says Williams.
Other aspects of the Liberator's hardware specification were defined by the needs of the operating system. So while Wojna was hammering out the electronics, software engineers Duncan Smeed and John Linney, aided by John Constant from Digital Research, tuned CP/M and its then brand-new menuing system for the new machine. Linney also wrote the text-editing software, which would later be released as Wordcom, coding the application in the then relatively little used C language rather than assembler, again in a bid to save time at the cost of a small but acceptable memory footprint overhead.

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...and the bottom half...
During the development process, the team were in almost constant contact with Bernard Terry who became, as Linney now recalls, "a focus group of one", overseeing the work the team were doing on the user interface, the physical interface and the word processing software, and steering them back on course when they move the product beyond what he believed civil servants would be able to understand and use.
"They kept coming back to me on specifications, and then they produced a prototype which I trialled and then modified," Terry recalls now. "They used me as a free consultant! They would say, 'we want to do this', and I would say, 'we don't want that, it's too complicated'."
It was Terry, for instance, who rejected the calculator-style keyboard originally held to be necessary to keep the machine's thickness down. No, he said, the Liberator must have a keyboard with large, full-travel keys. Interestingly, a memo Terry wrote to Andy Powell, Thorn EMI's business development manager, in August 1985 reveals that "during the initial stages of the UK kneetop development, a fair amount of thought was given by Derek [Williams] and I to the use of an alternative keyboard to the typing Qwerty style, as the unit was to be aimed at non-typing staff" and because "the CCTA have always shown an interest in a move towards more efficient and ergonic [sic] keyboards, including the Dvorak and the Maltron".

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...then put the two parts together
Ultimately, though, the scheme didn't come to fruition: the Liberator would ship with a Qwerty keyboard. "We were already breaking enough conventions with the Liberator," wrote Terry after development was complete, "and settled for the de facto standard."
The Liberator lives... almost
Both Terry and Williams insisted on a large display - notable at a time when past mobile computers, especially those he had evaluated in a bid to find a suitable machine for his Civil Service colleagues, had either tiny screens or wide, but shallow displays. The need to include the big screen - a Toshiba-made 80-character by 16-line job with a pixel resolution of 480 x 128, supplied without a display controller so Jan Wojna had to design one and build it into the FPGA; comparable products had 40-character by eight-line screens - almost certainly inspired the Liberator's clamshell design.
Derek Williams handled with the Liberator’s industrial design. The six-month design and build timeframe made gearing up steel tools for the machine’s injection-moulded case impossible to achieve, so Williams sought out firms who specialised in aluminium tooling and had experience in injection moulding. “Steel tooling would have take three to four months to prepare,” he says, “and that would not have worked for us. We needed to be able to develop the mouldings very, very quickly.”

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The 'CMND' key was crucial...
Williams approached the Production Engineering Research Association - now simply Pera - in Melton Mowbray, and Pera put him in touch with a consultant to work on the Liberator. “But they like steady, stable projects, and they weren’t used to pressure and constant revisions, and the guy working on the design and the tooling, he couldn’t handle the stress.” Williams began to search again, and found a Gloucester-based designer called Miles Bozeat. “He had experience in aluminium tooling, he was a very innovative designer. He took the project over from Pera.”
Bozeat came up with various designs, not only the angular look that was ultimately adopted for the Liberator but also a more rounded case which, Williams recalls, was the one favoured by Bernard Terry. But it was veto’d by the Thorn EMI marketing department, which favoured the “more contemporary” look that the machine eventually shipped with.
The Liberator, then, was a surprisingly thin and light machine, cased in cream plastic, with hinge half way along the top surface. Release the black catches on the left and right sides, and the forward part of the upper case springs up to reveal the 62-key keyboard, a slider control to adjust the screen's contrast, and the machine's monochrome LCD screen. Displayed around the panel: character- and line-count rulers, a nod toward the typewriter's formatting aids.

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Knee-friendly underneath?
The rear of the Liberator, which is where the majority of its ports were located, was protected by a plastic strip that could be pulled away from the back of the machine to form a carry handle. Fold the handle down and it became the laptop's stand. Rotate it the other way, up and over the top of the machine, and it became a support for the display, which would otherwise fold to lie back flat onto the top of the portable.
The screen had no fancy hinge, simply a thin - but durable, if surviving Liberators are anything to go by - plastic strip connecting the separate display housing to the body of the laptop, and containing the screen's signal ribbon cable and power feed. Pulling the handle away from the back of the machine exposed the Liberator's removable 9V battery pack, its two 8-pin, 9600 Baud Din-type serial ports, and a parallel Ram expansion port. There was a second, general-purpose parallel expansion port on the Liberator's left-hand side.
The Din ports were based on a specification called S5/8 - for 'Serial five Volt, eight-pin'. Its use had been proposed by the Public Service Working Party (PSWP), under the recommendation of Technical Consultant Andrew Hardie and others. The PSWP had found RS232 to have become a "plethora of incompatible sub-sets" of the standard, while an alternative interface, the Centronics specification, was impractical for mobile use because of its "expensive and even larger multiway connectors". So the PSWP devised S5/8, which would, the organisation believed, provide a simple, low-cost and low-power alternative ideal for mobile computers. It pitched S5/8 to the British Standards Institute (BSI) during 1984, and the technology was subsequently added to the Liberator specification.

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...but the Contrast control never quite overcame the LCD's limitations
The PSWP's motives may have been sound, but it proved a mistake for the Liberator. As reviewer Nick Walker noted in his evaluation of the Thorn EMI Machine for the September 1985 issue of Personal Computer World magazine: "It's doubtful this new standard will be adopted by printer manufacturers... Even Thorn EMI's own printers, especially selected for the Liberator, are Centronics machines with the necessary conversion box."
Specifications later suggested for next-generation Liberators would feature Centronics port.
The first Liberator's on-board memory was segmented into two banks, A and B, containing 40KB and 24KB, respectively - 64KB in total. There was a further 8KB of Ram on board for system use, but only the amount of user-accessible memory was stated in surprisingly honest promotional material. Flip a slider switch on the back, and bank B would not only kept powered by its own battery, but write protected like a diskette. Both banks were also fed from the main battery even when the Liberator was turned off, allowing their content to be retained - an amazing innovation in an era when most computers used floppy disks for non-volatile storage, hard drives were simply too big and too power hungry for a portable, and Flash solid-state storage was the stuff of dreams.
Even if the main battery ran flat or was removed, memory bank B's contents would be preserved by a built-in button cell that provided 50 to 500 hours' data protection, Thorn EMI claimed at the time.

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The two ports are the Din-based S5/8s, the would-be UK standard
According to the Liberator manual - preserved, along with a machine and many of its peripherals by the Science Museum - the machine's "memory is allocated in 'blocks' of about one thousand characters". Two blocks were assigned to the word processor's paste buffer. Linney recalls that memory was implemented in Static Ram because it consumed less power - energy wasn't expended regularly refreshing each memory cell's state.
Not every machine came with Bank B. Two models were put into production: the 40KB LPTP1001 and the 64KB LPTP1002. The former only had Bank A fitted, the latter Banks A and B. Both banks were separate, as was Bank C, added to either machine plugging the LRAM1060 24KB Ram pack into the Liberator's expansion port. It too could be write-protected and kept powered with its own on-board battery, allowing it to be used to swap files between machines.
The Liberator today
Viewing the Liberator 27 years on in the Science Museum's collection, I was struck by just how portable Thorn EMI's team of engineers had made the machine. The spec sheet quotes a battery-less weight of 1.7kg. Add a further 200g for the NiCad power pack and the total is not that much greater than a typical modern 13in laptop. Long-time mobile computing fans will have had to lug much heftier notebook computers around in the years since then.
With its 295 x 252mm footprint, the Liberator doesn't take up much more desk - or knee - space than an A4 sheet of paper. At 35mm thick, it's not exactly chunky, either.

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One of the two Liberator battery packs...
Similar thoughts occurred to PCW reviewer Nick Walker. “On removing the Liberator from its box, the first thing that strikes you is how thin the unit is... it is no more than 1.5in thick,” he said, adding that the Liberator had “probably the thinnest full-stroke keyboard I've seen. Even so, the keyboard is nice to use, with sculptured keys and a good, positive feel...
“The screen is... surprisingly large for a machine of the Liberator's price, and as such is capable of holding a decent amount of text on a single screen.”
True, but other reviewers had problems with the display. Not its size, but the nature of LCD technology in the mid-1980s. Punch's Michael Bywater was typical: "A lot of people hate LCD screen, I know. I'm not that keen myself, since they require direct lighting and direct lighting means that you get some glare off the screen glass, and if you move the lighting to avoid the glare, you can't see the screen."

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...and, yes, it could run happily for hours on four AA batteries
Michael Becket in the Daily Telegraph said seriously: "The screen is as good as any liquid crystal display. Opinions vary on the clarity of such things, but a reflective surface detracts from readability."
The Financial Times played it for laughs: "She opens the lid to reveal a flat, grey plastic screen. 'Beep,' it says in welcome. She types a few words but find its difficult to see them. She turns the machine this way, swivels it that way. All she sees on the screen is her own reflection, so she uses it to adjust her make-up. At £650 (excluding VAT), the Liberator makes an expensive mirror."
Carried using the handle - though the Liberator was also supplied with a branded, leather-look shoulder case, possibly the world's first dedicated laptop bag - I found it to be a remarkably easy machine to move around. The manufacturing quality is typically early 1980s British, but don't forget this machine was made in an era before today's highly computerised, ultra-precise production techniques evolved.

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Flip the switch on the battery-backed Ram pack to keep the contents safe from accidental erasure
That said, even contemporary reviewers were concerned about build quality. “Generally, the standard of workmanship on the review model was not equal to that on similar Japanese machines,” wrote Practical Computing’s Glyn Moody. “For example, the various sections of the moulding at the back are not totally flush, and the spring door on the Ram port is wonky. Thorn EMI says that the machines which will be sold to the public have better tolerances and overall finish.”
Maybe the manufacturer did say that, but judging from the machine I saw - a unit sold to a civil servant, not an early review sample - the Liberators provided for sale were no better.
I wasn’t permitted to power up Science Museum’s Liberator, but looking at the screen and trying the keyboard, I could see Bernard Terry’s vision of a portable device for getting down ideas and drafting documents was fully realised. Judging from the manual, and from the memories of users, it’s clear the development team had produced text manipulation tools writers would find themselves at home with today.

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Fold-up pocket guide: all you need to know to operate the Liberator
With the development work almost complete, Thorn EMI Information Technology’s marketing team, led by Ian Milne, began drumming up interest in the press. In late January 1985, Milne told journalists that the company was about to launch a portable machine codenamed ‘Mat’, for Management Aid Tool. Milne promised the system would launch before March.
It's not clear who coined the name 'Liberator' - Milne or one of his marketing team, says Derek Williams; it was a marketing department decision. Certainly by mid-February 1985, 'Mat' was out, Liberator was in.
Ready to launch... almost
The Liberator design team's first working prototypes were little more than circuit boards with keyboards and screens attached. The CCTA's deal with Thorn EMI called for an initial delivery of 40 complete units. These were hand-assembled by the team during the first months of 1985 when a strike at the Treorchy, Wales plant ensured that the original plan of getting workers there to build them had to be abandoned.

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Manual override: the Liberator was not promoted as a computer
“We all did whatever we had to do to make the thing work, and that meant forget about demarcation," says Williams. "There were obvious skill sets and that dictated who was going to do what, but at the end of the day, it was a joint effort.” So there was never any question of anyone not mucking in to get the units built. They all grabbed soldering irons and screwdrivers and set to work.
"We loaded up the back of my car, and I drove down to London and delivered the units to Bernard," remembers Williams. "Then I went to Sunbury-on-Thames [site of Thorn EMI's HQ] and showed them the receipt for the goods. They were totally gobsmacked. No one had delivered a project of that complextity on time and on budget before."
Bernard Terry handed six of the first prototypes to civil servants for pre-release testing. "I selected about six people who would then trial them and come back with feedback. For instance, one of the things the I underestimated was the file size that people required - it was bigger than I thought it should be. Now we had a limit on the file size, and we had to change it. And people would come back and say, 'It would be good if it did this, or it would be nice if you could add that', and we did keep on modifying and hopefully improving it.

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RTFM... but you never really needed to
"The main faults we found were manufacturing faults rather than system faults. There was nothing wrong with the software, there was nothing wrong with the hardware - it was how they were putting it together in South Wales," he told me.
Thorn EMI previewed the Liberator to 70 senior Civil Servants on 21 February 1985 at an event held in Riverwalk House, the CCTA's HQ. Bernard Terry discussed the motivation for the project and the thinking behind it, and demo'd the Liberator to attendees. Derek Williams talked about Thorn EMI's commitment to manufacturing the machine. On 18 March, Thorn EMI's marketing team began previewing the machine to CCTA and departmental staff. Civil Service pricing was agreed with Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO), which would be selling the device, and CCTA staff member Gordon Lawrence noted in a promotional document that "Thorn EMI is about to make the commercial launch and full production models are expected to be available in May 1985".
That proved overly optimistic. Come May, Thorn EMI was already saying the Liberator would launch in June, though HMSO had already started listing the machine in its catalogues and customer newsletters as "non-stock items" and was offering government departments further previews of the machine. At the same time, the CCTA was working with pre-production machines, testing the software to expose bugs that would need to be squashed before the final Rom was burned.

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Get it set
As John Peacock, the development team's finance manager, says, the first units highlighted issues that would need fixing before production could begin. The strike at the Treorchy didn't help, but at least it was short-lived. A bigger problem was that Thorn EMI bosses hadn't really believed the design team's claim that a working prototype would be ready early in 1985. It was, but Thorn EMI wasn't ready for it. And this was a time when initiating mass production required a lead time of at least 16 weeks, says Peacock.
Another problem, recalled by Derek Williams, was exposed when the machine was shown at the CCTA demo in February. The Treorchy plant had a wooden floor, but Riverwalk House was laid with nylon carpeting. The static electricity shocks the first Liberators were exposed to were something the rushed development team had never anticipated. Jan Wojna went back the to drawing board and in a few weeks had beaten the problem.
The June deadline was missed too, but Thorn EMI was sufficiently pleased with the product's progress to highlight the new device in its Annual Report, published in July of that year, calling it “a compact, easy-to-use and highly portable word processor with extensive applications”.

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No monster PSU for this mobile computer
That enthusiasm would fade. The following year, the company's Annual Report would not mention the Liberator at all. By that time, Thorn EMI was more concerned by the ongoing cash drain that was UK chip maker Inmos, which it had taken over in July 1984 after it acquired 76 per cent of the Transputer developer for £95m.
But at the end of September 1985, Thorn EMI had enough cash to splash out on an extravagant public launch in France, taking journalists to the Chateau d'Artigny near Tours in the Loire valley. They were given kit play with on the flight, the better to appreciate the value of being able to work even at 30,000 feet. How many of us don't take that for granted now?
Back in Treorchy, Thorn EMI was punching out Liberators, Jan Wojna having spent the first part of year overseeing the establishment of the production lines while John Linney and Duncan Smeed finished off the software. Following the portable text processor's launch, their job was largely done and they were soon tasked with other computing projects for Thorn EMI. The following year, they would be working on an IBM compatible laptop, an Intel 286-based machine derived from their work on the Liberator but based on the platform now rapidly establishing itself as the de facto standard.

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The world's first dedicated laptop bag?
Thorn canned the project just after the completion of the prototype, Wojna recalls, despite a major deal with “a major manufacturer” which John Peacock remembers was Daewoo. The Korean company was willing to make the machine and sell it in the States, but only if Thorn EMI committed itself to running a European sales operation. But Thorn wanted simply to license the design to other companies, Peacock recalls, and so the deal fell through.
Had the project reached the product stage, it would have been the first IBM-compatible notebook with an integrated hard drive to come to market, beating Toshiba, which launched the first HDD-fitted notebook PC, the T1200, in 1987.
Archaeologic In the early 1980s, civil servant Bernard Terry devised a 'portable text processor' to make his fellow civil servants more productive in the office and out. Electronics giant Thorn EMI designed the machine with help of a team of former Dragon Data engineers. As the Liberator, it launched in September 1985 to become the first British laptop and beating the first PC-compatible laptop, Toshiba's T1100, to market. Read the earlier instalments of the Liberator story in Part One and Part Two.
Now Read on...

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The Thorn EMI Liberator
Responsibility for the selling the newly launched Thorn EMI Liberator to civil servants had been handed over to Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO), the Civil Service's supply operation, in May 1985. Charged with selling the concept - and then the machine itself to Civil Service departments - was Reg Walker, then Assistant Director with HMSO's Supply Division, the group providing government workers with everything from word processors to photocopiers.
Already operating on internal market principles, HMSO sold the basic Liberator, the LPTP1001, for £567 excluding VAT and the more capacious, 64KB model for £639.45. On the open market, you could expect to pay £755 for the 40KB model, or £847 for the higher-capacity version.
Walker's task was to get out there and sell the thing. Expectations were high. The HMSO staff magazine's May 1985 issue, introducing the upcoming Liberator release, bullishly forecast: “It is estimated there will be a public-service requirement of 6000 of such devices plus printers during 1985-86 and 10,000 the following year... HSMO has the sole public-service agency which means a potential £4m in orders over the coming year.”

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Father of the Liberator Bernard Terry (left) and technical team leader Derek Williams (right) at the laptop's CCTA launch
Walker recalls receiving a lot of interest in the machine, but finding that, when it came to placing orders, “there wasn't enough money in the budget. [Departments had] already said they were going to buy this, that and the other that year, so how many £600s were they going to find for this wonderful new gadget?”
Office politics played a part too - ironically, since the Liberator had been designed to sidestep such issues. “It was felt by some that senior executives should be using their brains to solve problems, not type things; that was for the lowly typist,” recalls Walker.
Many people did buy Liberators, he remembers, just nowhere near the numbers forecast. Those who did place orders were generally impressed.

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Join the club: Thorn EMI seeks satisfied Liberator owners for the User's Group
“One of our accountants loved the thing, and he reckoned it was better than many of the things that came after because it was simple, it did just what you wanted: it processed your text and you didn’t have to bugger about too much with it,” Walker remembers.
“You could sit on the train and use the Liberator as a word processor, keeping your work in the memory. When you got back, you plugged it into your daisywheel printer and the job was done. And you could take it home and, despite being bought by the government, you could do your own bits and pieces on it.”
To prove the point, David Bothwell, a Senior Advisory Officer with Hampshire County Council, wrote his September 1986 review of the Liberator for the Local Government Chronicle on the Winchester-London train. Bothwell had first encountered the Liberator in the hands of one of a group school inspectors he met earlier that year. "School inspectors travel a great deal, and when one of them told me that with a Liberator he was able to work efficiently on a train for the first time, I decided it was a machine my colleagues and myself ought to test," he wrote.

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Keeping up to date: the Liberator newsletter for civil servants
The result: "20 advisers in Hampshire's education department use a Liberator as a working tool... Even my most untechnologically minded colleagues seem to have no difficulty mastering the Liberator after, at most, an hour's training or self-tuition from the straightforward user manual."
Dr Andrew Craig, then the Principal Administrator at the Royal College of Nursing, heaped even more praise on the Liberator. Writing in the Independent Health Service Yearbook, he lauded how the machine, "as the Americans say, helps me 'shovel a lot more words a lot more quickly'... What the Liberator does is enable me to miss out an entire step in the document creation process". Handy, that, for someone who had to "capture large amounts of text daily... I gave the Liberator a baptism of fire at the recent Royal College of Nursing annual conference in Blackpool. This involved my having to make a highly accurate record of a series of meetings attended by about 1500 people. Since I was seated on the stage at the time, I couldn't use any word processing device that made a noise. The Liberator came through the conference with flying colours".
No wonder he told fellow senior healthcare administrators: "I can recommend the Liberator... with all my heart."
Not enough of a PC
Personal Computer World magazine's Nick Walker and other Liberator reviewers liked the machine’s simplicity - the ease of use which Bernard Terry, who had by now quit the Civil Service and was working as a consultant to Thorn EMI's marketing team, had wanted from the start. Reviewers Glyn Moody, for Practical Computing, and Nick Walker both praised that ‘everyman’ quality too.
“As a final test of the machine’s simplicity, I left it in the hands of a non-computer user. Within an hour, she was creating finished documents, and was familiar with most of the editing operations,” wrote Walker in PCW. “Similar experiments with a full-scale word processor can take weeks, so it does seem that Thorn EMI has succeeded in making the machine very easy to use.”

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Coasting along: the laptop for the surfing?
That that was the case was all thanks to Bernard Terry continually flying the flag for simplicity during the Liberator's development. That included building a tutorial into the machine. "I wrote the tutorial, which incidentally all my grandchildren were brought up on," Terry recalls today.
Both Walker and Moody were pleased with the Liberator's ease of use, but couldn't refrain from complaining that rival products, primarily word processing packages for desktop computer, could do a whole lot more. Indeed, they also highlighted the Liberator’s inability to do anything else other than edit text. Despite Thorn EMI’s July 1985 pre-launch claim that the laptop had access to an “extensive applications” library, there were no other programs offered with the machine than Wordcom.
“Perhaps the main problem with the machine is that it is only a word processor,” Moody judged. “There is no electronic mail - though Thorn EMI hopes to release this very soon - and no other programs run on it. This places it at considerable disadvantage to its Japanese rivals.”

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A computer designed up for text editing, the Liberator was criticised for not being enough of a PC
Added Walker: “I did yearn for a few features found on more complex word processors. Most noticeable was the lack of line spacing and centring or right justification for headings and addresses.” Both writers noted that the Liberator lacked a readily accessible operating system - though Walker had spotted a Digital Research copyright notice - and a Basic interpreter. Of course, the Liberator used CP/M, but it remained buried beneath the text editor, deliberately to avoid baffling or intimidating non-technical users.
Of course, both writers were computer people - not at all the kind of folk Bernard Terry had envisioned the Liberator being used by. He wanted a simple, dedicated text processing machine, and that’s what he got. But it was being sold against general-purpose computers that salespeople could pitch as kit able to do anything at all - just plug in the right software: word processors like WordStar, spreadsheets like Multiplan, databases like dBase and a whole lot more besides. And, as Terry himself admits today, back then IT purchasing was mainly handled by IT professionals, and they wanted to buy 'real' computers, not application-specific kit for everyone else.

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Converting the Liberator's S5/8 Din ports to the more useful Centronics connector require kit like this
Towards the end of 1985, it was announced that the Liberator was up for a Rita: a Recognition of Information Technology Achievement award. It was shortlisted in the Systems Innovation of the Year, but come the awards night on 14 January 1986 it was the Sinclair QL-based One-Per-Desk phone-computer combo from ICL which was announced as the winner by Blue Peter's Lesley Judd.
Six months later, Thorn EMI's 1986 Annual Report tersely hinted at problems with one of its subsidiaries: Thorn EMI Dynatel, which just so happened to be the Treorchy-based operation to which the Dragon Data team had been initially connected and whose future the Liberator project was supposed to secure. Instead, by March 1986, Thorn EMI had rid itself of the division and the factory, selling it off to Swansea-based Industrial Developments in a bid to shore itself up against the even greater losses it was being subjected to by chip maker Inmos and another subsidiary, Thorn EMI Datatech.
The one-time Liberator factory in Treorchy was finally closed in the late 1990s. By then it was owned by a Chinese firm, Wang’s International. Now it is entirely derelict, just an empty shell.

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A very bad year: Thorn EMI had a tough 1985-86, thanks to losses at chip maker Inmos and hardware manufacturer Datatech
Datatech's woes centred on the ongoing decline of the home computer market. It had been Sinclair’s production partner, for instance, punching out Spectrums and QLs. “Datatech experienced a difficult year and a major reorganisation programme has been instituted to improve profitability,” Thorn EMI bosses noted in the 1986 Annual Report. The subsidiary, “which also used to manufacture for Sinclair”, underwent a turn-around programme “necessitating substantial reductions in staff levels and facilities”.
Sinclair’s own troubles would see it acquired that year - the deal was announced on 7 April 1986; Thorn EMI’s difficult financial year ended on 31 March - by Amstrad. Alan Sugar’s company wanted to produce Sinclair products cheaply in the Far East and, after a brief period while Datatech used up its stock of components, moved Spectrum manufacturing to Asia.
Against some stiff competition
With the loss of Sinclair, Liberator production was moved from Treorchy to Datatech's Feltham, Middlesex plant. John Cavell, who worked at Thorn EMI at the time, says that the move was not a success. Cavell was Datatech’s Materials Manager and had been tasked with the planning and execution of the transfer of Liberator production from Treorchy to Feltham. “Very few units were produced at Feltham, as demand was very low,” he recalls.

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Bernard Terry demos the Liberator to (left) Victor Maller, Thorn EMI Information Technology's Director of Technology.
The other participant (right) is unknown
The CCTA’s enthusiasm for the machine had not led to the forecast volume of sales, and the Liberator was not a huge seller in the public sphere. In September 1985, just as the Liberator was coming to market, Amstrad launched the PCW 8256, an all-in-one desktop machine that, though a CP/M-running, Z80A-based computer, was marketed as a word processor, just as the Liberator would be. The PCW may not have been portable, but it came bundled with a built-in floppy drive, 256KB of memory and dot-matrix printer. It cost just £460 including VAT sales tax, then 15 per cent.
Of course, the Liberator had the advantage of mobility, and was undoubtedly superior to the handheld machines Bernard Terry had assessed in 1983. But three years on, its specification was looking less competitive.
"When you design, you can't design into the future," Terry remembers. "I don't think anyone realised then how far memory prices would soon tumble."

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Toshiba's T1100: the first IBM-compatible laptop - but maybe not the first mainstream machine of its type
After the specification had been set, Ram prices plunged, allowing later machines, or those devised by more fleet-of-foot developers, to deliver more memory. Amstrad's PCW contained four times as much Ram as the Liberator.
And the IBM compatibles were coming. Clones of IBM's desktop line were widespread by the time of the Liberator's launch and rapidly cementing their dominance of the business computing market. HP had introduced the portable HP 110 in 1984, and it was still on sale the following year, albeit for a colossal £2995, which bought you lots of Ram - 272KB - plus a 5.33MHz 80C88 CPU, MS-DOS but not true IBM compatibility, an 80-character x 16-line text LCD all packed into a unit that weighed 3.9kg.
Toshiba released its first laptop, the T1100, in 1985 just after the Liberator launch. It had commonly used ports, a 3.5in floppy drive, only weighed 4.1kg, was PC-compatible, packed in 256KB of Ram and could run for up to eight hours on a charge of its rechargeable battery. Of course, it would have set you back $2000 - two and a half times what the Liberator cost. Toshiba today claims the T1100 was the world's first mainsteam laptop, but the Liberator was announced, to civil servants, months before Toshiba went public with its machine.

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Liberator rivals: HP's 110 (left) and Epson's PX-8
Other rivals included the Kaypro 2000, which also appeared earlier in 1985. With its use of a lead-acid battery, it weighed a fraction under 5kg - not exactly light enough for easy on-the-knee usage - and came equipped with a removable keyboard, it was clearly intended to be more a desk-use PC you could move from place to place than a truly mobile computer.
Perhaps a closer machine to the Liberator - though, at £1600, it was twice the price, and was a rather weightier 5kg - was the Hong Kong-made Bondwell 2, which also ran CP/M - version 2.2 - on a 4MHz Z80A processor. It was equipped with a Liberator-beating 80-character by 25-line, 640 x 200 pixel display, 64KB of Ram and a 3.5in floppy drive.
Not that the Liberator's own specification was ever intended to remain unchanged. In an "outline specification" dated 24 April 1986, Thorn EMI Information Technology staff were presented with an updated design proposal, dubbed the Liberator Mk 1A. Planned to incorporate a 6MHz Z80-compatible processor - the Hitachi HD64180 - it would run 50 per cent faster than its predecessor and incorporate more I/O functionality than the Zilog original, the kind of features today we'd find in a system-on-a-chip part.

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Where next? Planning the Liberator's future
Falling memory prices saw the main Bank A Ram upped to 96KB, configured as 24KB of working space plus 72KB for storage - again non-volatile, kind of, thanks to a built in button battery. An external 3.5in floppy drive would be offered too, though whether as a bundle - to match the machines already offering a built-in drive - or optional isn't made clear in the documentation.
The on-board software would be extended with address book, alarm clock, scope to install multiple printer drivers, and enhanced communications tools. Bernard Terry's text processor was becoming a personal organiser. The editor would get an overhaul, gaining the ability to add headers and footers to documents; adjustable tabulation; string search and replace rather than just search; and in-document line and word counts.
How the Liberator might have evolved
The same document also looked further ahead, briefly indicating what a Liberator Mk 2 might feature: 256KB of Ram; an 80-character by 25-line display; a built-in modem; better, more broadly compatible I/O connectors: RS-232 serial ports in place of the original's S5/8s plus a Centronics port; and the use of a surface mount assembly motherboard to reduce the space it takes up, allowing designers to produce a slimmer machine or increase the battery size.
The proposed spec was devised by Thorn EMI's new Advanced Product Development Centre, founded at the time of the Dynatel sell-off. When Liberator production in Treorchy ended, Derek Williams, John Peacock and the Liberator design team relocated to St. Lawrence House in Broad Street, central Bristol to establish the APDC. The location was chosen to put them in close proximity to the talent being nurtured in nearby Bristol University. So says John Linney - Jan Wojna’s recollection is of a more cynical motive: to bring this valuable resource over the Severn Bridge and out of the increasingly impoverished South Wales. But the APDC was quickly expanded, bringing in talent such as Frank Shirvani, Martyn Wyatt and Alan Drake.

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How future models would have changed
The Liberator developers’ involvement with the machine clearly hadn't ended entirely with the launch, but Thorn EMI soon had them working in new products and technologies almost immediately. Among the post-Liberator projects they worked on before and after the move to Bristol were video jukebox systems, hotel information systems, sales terminals and, of course, the ill-fated portable PC.
But Derek Williams and John Peacock had no say in how the Liberator was promoted and sold. Even now, nearly 30 years on, you can hear the frustration entering Williams' voice when he talks of opportunities missed by Thorn EMI and the corporation's lack of foresight and entrepreneurialism. Watching them handle the Liberator was "like watching someone drown and being unable to help". Trying to persuade them there was a better way was "like pushing water uphill". He would have suggested giving him and his team 'ownership' of the product but "I knew that would have fallen on deaf ears".
The Mk 1A Liberator, let alone the Mk 2, never saw light of day, either. Despite the plaudits the Liberator received - early in 1986 it was nominated for a Recognition of Information Technology Achievement (Rita) award in the Systems Innovation of the Year category, alongside Research Machines' RM Nimbus and ICL's One Per Desk - sales slowed to the point where Thorn EMI felt it necessary to end production.
Thorn EMI Datatech eventually stopped punching out Liberators in or around September 1986, just a year after the laptop’s public launch.

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Jan Wojna (left) and John Linney today
Andrew Hardie, he of the Oval group of companies and PSWP fame, now struck a deal with Thorn EMI to acquire the remaining stocks of complete Liberators and finished components. These, Oval assembled into new machines and sold them until the parts ran out. In 1987, Hardie formed Oval Wordcom. John Linney, the software’s writer, became a director too. Linney had ported the Liberator’s world processor to run on IBM PCs and compatibles - possibly during the development of the Thorn EMI Portable PC; he doesn’t recall the precise timeframe now - and it was hoped that the firm could build a solid business on the back of it.
Oval Wordcom would eventually be dissolved in 1995, but Linney recalls seeing the writing on the wall five years earlier with the launch of Windows 3.0. By this time, he had long since left England for the US, joining Digital Research’s DR-DOS development team in 1987, an indirect result of his collaboration with the company on the Liberator's incarnation of CP/M. He would later join Novell and go on to run its ISV program. He is now VP of Marketing for San Diego-based clean energy company SolarCity.
Jan Wojna stayed at Thorn right through its 1996 demerger with EMI. Three years later, Thorn Plc spun off its set-top box business - which developed TV systems for the hospitality industry - as Quadriga. Wojna went with it, and he works there still, now as Product Team Support Manager. So did his former Dragon Data and Thorn EMI colleague John Peacock, until his retirement last month.

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John Peacock (left) and Duncan Smeed today
Duncan Smeed, the Liberator team’s Software Manager, quit Thorn EMI in 1986 a short time after the erstwhile Dragon R&D team’s move to Bristol. He returned to the University of Strathclyde, which he’d left to join Dragon Data in 1983. He’s teaching there to this day.
Derek Williams stayed with with Thorn EMI for some years, eventually becoming IT Director of its Business Communications operation. But when that division was merged into Thorn EMI’s Radio Rentals operation, Derek called it a day. He now runs a web consultancy business.
Reg Walker remained a civil servant, though his career took him to various divisions within it, until 1996 when the HMSO was privatised by John Major's Conservative government. He left the civil service and entered the private sector. He is now enjoying his retirement and runs the HMSOldies website.

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Derek Williams (left) and Bernard Terry in 2012
And the Liberator's father? Bernard Terry remained connected with his 'text editor', even after hardware production ceased. He joined Andrew Hardie and John Linney to run Oval Worldcom while offering his services as a technology implementation consultant to the Civil Service and to government, right up to Prime Ministerial level.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank all the members of the Liberator project who worked at Thorn EMI and in the Civil Service who agreed to be interviewed for this history - Reg Walker, Duncan Smeed, John Linney, Jan Wojna, John Peacock and Derek Williams - and others who provided information by email. I would especially like to thank Bernard Terry, sharp as mustard despite his 85 years, without whom this history would be much less detailed. Errors and misunderstandings are all my own. I would also like to thank the Science Museum for providing invaluable access to its not-on-public-view Liberator hardware and document collection.