MEMOTECH  DISK OPTIONS

Less Common or "One-off" Specials

As I have been researching Memotech's products, it has become obvious that there were a lot of "custom" configurations shipped. I suspect that this may  have been almost a "make do and mend" approach by Memotech, that probably became necessary as the business started to fail and cost cutting became a major focus for the company. Although I suppose an alternative view might be that, as a small company, Memotech had the flexibility to adapt quickly to customer requirements - what do you think?

However, there were also a couple of almost "standard" products that I am aware of that are mentioned on the Options page:-

• Memotech MTX2000

• Memotech Business/2

These systems appear to be very similar, both having the main MTX system board installed in a half height, FDX like, black aluminium case with a 3.5" DS/DD disk drive. The MTX keyboard just housed the keyboard PCB and used a coiled multi-core cable to connect to the main board in the disk chassis.

As well as the main system board, the chassis included a SDX like combined floppy disk controller and Silicon/RAM disk board, an 80 Column board and a modem board.

Marco Virginio in Italy has Memotech Business/2 system. Perhaps this is another model manufactured for the Italian market? Marco's system has very similar hardware to the MTX2000 described above, but the MTX logo on the keyboard has been replaced by the "Business 2" logo. I have been unable to contact Marco, so this photo is the one from Andy's site.
Inside of Marco's Memotech Business/2 System   This photo is also from Andy's site.

An example of a "one-off" special is the hybrid system that was given to Andy Key by Geoff Boyd. It is in the same half-height, FDX like, case and has a 32kb MTX main board, an SDX floppy disc controller with SCPM + SDX EPROM and 512KB RAM, a single 3.5" disk drive, MTX serial card and internal PSU. Andy's "special" is shown on his MTX products page, although I have included some photos below :-

Andy's "special" Memotech disk system, given to him by Geoff Boyd The 3.5" floppy disk drive is visible on the left and the keyboard, labelled MTX512S2, can be seen at the bottom of the picture.
With the floppy removed, you can see the RAM disk at the left, and the cut-down RS232 serial card, without the FDX interface, on the right. Whilst it has similar components, it is interesting too see that Andy's machine has a much different layout than Peter's 3.5" disk system.