The early days of Hexatec were based in Prudhoe – specifically in a small front bedroom in Dick’s house! This was sustainable for a while but it became apparent that if we were to progress as desired then premises would need to be found. Dick hunted around and eventually found office space in the center of Hexham – the 2nd floor above an existing cafe in the Cattle Market! We divided up into two areas – office and technology.
Epson QX10 – our first computer
At about this time, an application to Northumberland County Council gave us our one and only financial assistance in the form of a grant with which we purchased a computer and printer. I had experience of the Epson QX10 whilst still working at the university and it had, for the time, very fast graphics display at a decent resolution allbeit only in black and white. However it was an 8 bit processor and ran CP/M so would not become a popular system in the future as the IBM PC and its many clones were starting to take over the microcomputer market. A decent printer (I think it was an Epson dot matrix printer, not yet quality printing!) meant no more typewriter typing for Dick!
Slow expansion
Slowly, contacts were made with other companies with the possibility of expanding the product range. Two strands of product development emerged – low power hardware with dedicated software (firmware) and microcomputer based software to couple with existing data acquisition hardware.
Hardware products
Experience gained with the
- RCA 1802 processor - which was used to design the
- DA1470 - a small single board computer with all the advantages it offered for remote data acquisition. From this, we developed the
- HT1470 - as an expandable system. In both cases, as with the WindLogger / MicroMonitor we designed
- software - for each of the products as required.
Software Products
In parallel with 1470 designs, we were developing bespoke software for microcomputers.
1983 and we were approached by the UK section of Testoterm, a German company, about the possibilty of producing microcomputer software to support their 100 channel scanning thermometer and offer a ‘High Tec’ replacement for chart recorders which were all ink pen and paper based. This led to a software design for the Commodore PET microcomputer – a popular single box computer at the time. One problem however, the PET didn’t have high resolution graphics necessary for the display of time sequence graphs – PET graphics were character based suitable for the games available at the time. We found an add-on card for the PET which did offer graphics resolution required but was only available from Germany. I had previously designed an accounts system for N.E.W. on the PET microcomputer so had experience of the PET Basic language. The display design was based on the chart recorder, replacing the paper output with a scrolling display on the monochrome display with regular scans of all the inputs adding to the display when complete.
We also designed a standalone microcomputer based graphical display system with up to 128 analogue inputs for another company. The system displayed bar graphs using colours to indicate alarm conditions. Again, Basic language based. The display format eventually found its way into our own products.