Imagesource: http://www.8bit-homecomputermuseum.at/

This past August, it was a whopping 40 years since Dragon Data Ltd. positioned its flagships, Dragon 32 and Dragon 64, on the market. The machines powered by the Motorola 6809 certainly played a role, particularly in the European market, but it was likely the somewhat limited graphical capabilities compared to the competition that kept the systems from becoming a mega-hit. 🤷

Regardless, there are many Dragon enthusiasts, frequent meetups, and every now and then, a few fascinating stories around the Dragon see the light of day. Recently, David Linsley, aka @DavidLinsley11, was responsible for such a tale. At the latest Dragon meetup in Port Talbot, he and a group of collaborators had the pleasure of scanning the source code for Microsoft BASIC for the Dragon 64 from a dusty paper listing and running it through an OCR process.

Unfortunately, the result isn't 100% complete – but what isn't now, can still become. In fact you can learn a lot from the source, given you enjoy tinkering with handcrafted assembly for the 6809. (Not that I could imagine anything more enjoyable... 🙄)

Fancy a bit of British history? Here you go.