British Micro Advert - February 1984
From Acorn User
Grafpad - for as many uses as YOU can imagine!
British Micro was a company started by Manas Heghoyan, formerly of Hegotron Printed Circuit Boards Ltd and who had once tried to buy John Marshall's Nascom after it had gone bust in 1980.
Although that buy-out had failed, Heghoyan was still keen to enter the microcomputer industry and so, with some encouragement from Marshall[1], set up his own company - British Micro.
The company's first product was the Mimi 801, a re-badged and improved version of Gemini Micro's GM801. It followed up with the Mimi 802 in 1982, and a model 804 some time later.
The Grafpad came later at a time when British Micro seemed to have stopped building computers and was focussing on peripherals. It seems to have been reasonably successful as there was a follow-up: the imaginatively-named Grafpad II.
Grafpad also appeared on a range of machines including the "BBC Model 2" (possibly the popular Model B or perhaps the recently announced B+), Spectrum and Commodore 64, with the later model also featuring on the IBM PC and Amstrad's CPC[2].
Date created: 02 July 2015
Last updated: 28 July 2025
Sources
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