Millbank Advert - January 1981

Millbank's System 10 was launched towards the end of 1980 and was still being sold into 1985.

For most of that time though the company seemed to be flying under the radar, with just the odd advert now and then.

It was founded by Alan Miller and Tim Mott, the former having run an office stationery business before getting involved with micros after using a Nascom kit to try and run a stock control system - an attempt which ultimately failed mostly due to a lack of disk drives or expansion in general.

It was also challenging programming the Nascom in machine code, although Miller appeared to see that as a long-term benefit, suggesting that it was:

"Like going back to school, getting the old Grey Matter going again"

After Milller had visited the US, he decided to start importing and selling Ohio's Challenger 3 via its main US distributor American Data, as it seemed to be the ideal small-business machine at the time.

In November 1979, he met Tim Mott, who was looking to sell his business Millbank Computing.

Miller purchased the company with money from his stationery business, and renamed it to Millbank Computers, with the company's first profitable deal being to import Qume printers.

Millbank's later System 10 was actually built by a small independent OEM manufacturer based in San Diego, California, called Gnat Computers^[1], which had been founded in 1976 and which is considered to have been probably the first company to licence Gary Kildall's CP/M operating system^[2].

The micro was co-developed with Data Technology Industries, which ended up buying out Gnat in 1983.

The deal for a modest 200 units a year also allowed Millbank to assemble the machines itself in the UK if it needed more, with Gnat even providing the original design blueprints if required.

The System 10 itself is mostly a regular Z80-based micro running CP/M, with 65K of memory - probably with the extra 1K being allocated for video, although that's normally only enough for a 40-column display.

It did differ slightly from the mainstream though by offering an unusual RS-449 serial communication port, which was identified on the machine as "Network I/O".

RS-449 was an attempt to improve the regular RS-232 standard - as used by serial ports and mainframe connections - by improving the speed and supporting longer cable lengths.

The better-known RS-422 "current loop" was a part of the overall project, but RS-449 ended up requiring more wires than even the larger DB-25 serial sockets then in use provided, and so was never that popular.

At launch, the System 10 retailed for £2,995 plus VAT, which is about £19,100 in 2026.

Millbank's System 10 micro, still for sale in late 1982. From Practical Computing, September 1982

The System 10 was advertised again in the late summer of 1982, when Millbank was advertising it as "arguably the most reliable micro available", and as the "heavy duty" microcomputer.

It was also shown with a bunch of printers, including an Olivetti with a price of around £2,000 plus VAT - that's a not-insignificant £11,400 now.

At around the same time, Millbank also launched a Telex module - the CTX-10 Telex System - which was one of a handfull of systems which received Telex messages as well as helping to pre-prepare them, thus avoiding unneccesary and expensive online charges.

System 10 was still around as late as October 1985 - a somewhat unexpected run of five years, and well into the era of the IBM PC - when it was mentioned, along with the LSI Octopus, Transtec and TeleVideo systems, as being one of several machines that could read SuperBrain floppy disks^[3].

Practical Computing had reviewed the System 10 in its December 1980 edition, stating:

"Although, of course, the system could run as a stand-alone commercial micro, and do very well, it would seem a pity to waste all the effort that has been put into the design of the interfaces which are standard. I suspect that this machine is going to sell very well to the scientific community and engineering users who will be prepared to dig into all the options offered on this well-designed micro^[4]".