TDI/Pinnacle Advert - April 1985

TDI, based in Clifton, Bristol, was a technology distributor and a VAR - a Value Added Reseller - which had become the largest customer of Sage Computer's "speed machine" micros - the Sage II and later the Sage IV.

The two companies had met in the late summer of 1982 - shortly after Sage's first computer, the Sage II, had gone into production - at a p-System conference in Boston.

Sage hadn't even been considering foreign markets at the time, but TDI offered to look after all the stock and support issues and so a deal was signed.

In early 1983, TDI arranged a press conference to launch the Sage II in the UK, with the machine even making the cover of Personal Computer World's February 1983 edition.

It was a success, and led to TDI's sales increasing. Rod Coleman, founder of Sage, said of the launch that:

"THIS was what marketing was SUPPOSED to look like! I may not be great doing it myself, but I definitely know it when I see it. Our other international distributors even rode TDI's coattails into their local markets. And I took some of the ideas back home^[1]".

Meanwhile, back at the end of 1982, Sage had hired a new marketing manager - Steve Gant - who almost immediately went out and set up his own distributor network around the US, using people he'd met at Las Vegas Comdex in November 1982, but without board approval.

When Coleman found out, this new distributor network was terminated, however when it came to returning the pre-sale hardware, the distributor from Texas - Dave Winstanley - refused saying that "A deal's a deal", leading to Sage taking Winstanley to court.

Sometime in 1984, in what appeared almost to be a grudge match, Winstanley was back with his own company - Pinnacle Systems - and a clone of the Sage II, something easy to do as Sage had been very open with its documentation, right down to publishing the schematics of the hardware and the code for its own BIOS.

Unfortunately for Sage, the Pinnacle, with its even-more competitive price, started to eat into Sage's market, with Pinnacle also starting to pick up some of Sage's existing dealers.

For TDI, this posed a problem as there were rumours that Pinnacle was about to sign with one of its major competitors, so to prevent this TDI signed up with Pinnacle as well, hoping to carry both products at the same time.

And so here it is - TDI's re-badged Pinnacle micro, built by Texas-based Pinnacle Systems of the US.

Claiming to be the fastest micro in the world, the Pinnacle ran Motorola's 68000 CPU at 12MHz and could support seven users on its UCSD p-System - the fast Pascal-based operating system that was also found on Sage's micros.

Indeed, the Sage II - which it was effectively a clone of - was still being shown to be the fastest system available as late as August 1985^[2].

At launch it was said to be thirteen times faster than an Apple II and four times faster than IBM's 5150 PC.

See also TDI/Sage.