In early 1984 I left my post at the university and became full-time at Hexatec. Quite a change! Gone were the regular commutes to Newcastle from where I lived at Settlingstones with Jos and our three children but this meant a sudden increased financial strain on Hexatec. Did we have enough work to keep us going?
Up until now we had drawn no wages - Dick worked fulltime, initially at home, then in Hexham. Our overheads increased with the move to Hexham and associated rent but now a substantial increase with wages to be found. Our work changed considerably - I was now back into fulltime design, Dick was partly manufacturing alongside establishing customer contacts and the ever increasing office work associated with running a small business. This brought about, over time, employing other people - technical and office which again, increased overheads. Somehow we kept our heads above water (just!) with a difficult balance between income and expenditure - a situation that continued throughout the years to come with turnover, staff and office space increasing and decreasing several times.
HT1470 Development
HT1470 development continued and with more manpower available Dick was able to put together increasingly sophisticated product literature - we were no longer limited to a typewriter! Product development was however limited by cost so we were looking for other companies to work with on a product range. We put together a development proposal along with the first advertising leaflet:
We were however able to produce basic bespoke designs based on the system.
100SCAN – Testoterm scanner with Sanyo 16 bit computer
The PET design for Testoterm worked fine but due to the specialised hardware was not able to be easily replicated. In 1984 we took the design using the same scanning hardware, modified the software for use on a 16 bit microcomputer which had a full colour ‘high resolution’ (200x640!) display, the Sanyo 550. We then marketed this alongside Testoterm as a complete product:
Small Computers
One aspect of being a 'real' I.T. company with offices in Hexham meant we started to get local enquiries for small computers. We had a rival, just across the road marketing Apple products but the IBM PC was now really generating a lot of interest. IBM computers were however, very expensive in the U.K. and a number of similar lower cost products started to appear that were able to run the same software. We took on ACT products - the expensive Sirius (more powerful than the IBM) and its lower cost sibling, the Apricot. This was always a secondary front to our industrial product developments although previous experience at the university gave a useful basis for being able to talk knowledgeably about this market. We didn't limit ourselves to just one manufacturer however as we also had the Sanyo range mentioned above, not fully IBM compatible, along with a number of IBM PC clones through contacts I had previously developed whilst at the university.