Miles Gordon Technology, known as MGT was a small British company, initially specialising in high-quality add-ons for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer. It is named for its founders, Alan Miles and Bruce Gordon. Sinclair Research Ltd was a home computer company founded by Clive Sinclair in Cambridge, England. ... The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was a small home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research. ... Bruce Gordon, 2005. ...

As the Spectrum became hugely popular, the lack of a mass-storage system became a problem for more serious users, and while Sinclair's response, the Interface 1 and Microdrive, was very cheap and technologically innovative it was also rather limited. A peripheral from Sinclair Research for their ZX Spectrum computer, Interface 1 launched in 1983. ... The name Microdrive has been used to designate data storage devices. ...

Many companies developed interfaces to connect floppy disk drives to the Spectrum, one of the most successful being the Opus Discovery, however these were all to some degree incompatible with Sinclair's system. A floppy disk is a data storage device that is composed of a circular piece of thin, flexible (i. ...

MGT's approach was different. It produced two different floppy-disk interfaces for the Spectrum, first the DISCiPLE and later the cut-down PlusD. Both, however, shared certain features: DISCiPLE, Miles Gordon Technologys first product, was a floppy disk interface for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer. ... The Plus D (or +D) was a floppy disk and printer interface for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer, developed as a successor to Miles Gordon Technologys earlier product, the DISCiPLE. It was designed to be smaller, cheaper, simpler and thus more reliable. ...

• a Shugart-compatible port for connecting one or two floppy diskette drives (the de facto standard created by Shugart Associates)
• a parallel printer port
• a "magic button"

The latter generated a Non-Maskable interrupt, freezing any software running on the Spectrum and allowing it to be saved to disk. This made it simple to store tape-based games on disk, to take screenshots and to enter cheat codes. A duplicate expansion connector at the back allowed other peripherals to be daisy-chained, although the complexity of the DISCiPLE meant that many would not work correctly. Shugart Associates was a computer peripheral manufacturer, famous for introducing the floppy disk to the microcomputer market. ... A computer printer is a computer peripheral device that produces a hard copy (permanent human-readable text and/or graphics, usually on paper) from data stored in a computer connected to it. ... A non-maskable interrupt (or NMI) is a special type of interrupt used on in most types of microcomputer, for example the IBM PC and Apple II. An NMI causes the CPU to stop what it was doing, change the program counter to point to a particular address and continue... A screenshot of the Wikipedia website, taken on Debian GNU/Linux running the X Window system A screenshot, screen dump, or screen capture is an image taken by the computer to record the visible items on the monitor or another visual output device. ... For an account of the words periphery and peripheral as they are used in biology, sociology, politics, computer hardware, and other fields, see the periphery disambiguation page. ... The elementary meaning of daisy chain is a garland created from the daisy flower, generally as a childrens game. ...

However, the real innovation was in the ROM. Unlike most of the competing systems, this was compatible with the Sinclair's extended ROM, meaning that the same BASIC commands used to operate Microdrives or the ZX Printer now could control floppy disk drives or a standard parallel printer. As well as being BASIC-compatible, though, it also mimicked the machine code entry points in the Interface 1 - the so-called "hook codes". This meant that any Microdrive-specific software could use floppy disk drives connected to MGT interfaces instead, without modification. Rom is also the name of a toy and comic book character Rom (Spaceknight). ... BASIC is a family of high-level programming languages. ... A system of codes directly understandable by a computers CPU is termed this CPUs native or machine language. ...

Sinclair's Microdrive command syntax was so complex that a selling point of many disk interfaces was that their commands were simpler. While loading from tape required a simple

LOAD "progname"

the equivalent Microdrive syntax was

LOAD *"m";1;"progname"

Given the complexity of entering punctuation on the Spectrum's tiny keyboard, this was cumbersome. In addition to supporting the Sinclair syntax, MGT's code reduced the command to

LOAD d1"progname"

Later, MGT produced the Lifetime Drive range (later named Universal Drive after concerns about warranty expectations). The drive was advertised as being compatible with major systems on the market at the time and comprised of four models (3.5" and 5.25", with and without their own power supplies). Compatibility with various machines was achieved using a DIP switch and computer-specific cables.

The final product, which resulted in the company's demise, was the SAM Coupé. The SAM Coupé bootup screen The SAM Coupé was an 8-bit British home computer that was first released in late 1989. ...

External links

• MGT Lifetime/Universal Disc Drive FAQ (http://www.envytech.co.uk/mgt/)
• DISCiPLE/+D Technical Guide (http://www.ramsoft.bbk.org/tech/mgt_tech.txt)