Castle Technology transcript
The transcript of Alasdair Bailey's interview with Jack Lillingston of Castle Technology.
Alasdair: Did Acorn's announcement of October '98 come as a surprise to you?
Jack: It came as a hell of a surprise and a total shock, yes.
Alasdair: So you didn't see it coming then?
Jack: I think there'd been a lot of discussions but a couple of weeks before the announcement, there was a dealer meeting at which there was a last ditch attempt to get money in for Phoebe. At that stage, I was nervous about the future. So, one didn't expect them to do what they did at all.
Alasdair: Tell us the story of how you came to obtain Acorn's old stock and brand name.
Jack: Well, it really all goes back to the very beginning. In '87, I started working for a company associated with Acorn after their previous collapse when Olliveti stepped in and bailed them out. We did a lot of export work. I then met John Ballance and he produced a SCSI card which we then sold and one thing led to another then in '93, we set up Castle Technology and we produced, first of all the ergo keyboard, then an IDE interface and SCSI interface.
At that time, Sam Alcott was still MD of Acorn and they went through all sorts of reorganisations - with new computers coming on stream and things like that. Every time they did that, we negotiated with them for their older stock which we then put our own upgrades in; memory, hard drives and CD drives or whatever and sold those out to the industry. Then I heard about a German warehouse of A3010s that they were basically going to chuck out so we brought all of those over. There were two articulated lorries full! We put new keyboards on, altered them to UK spec, put hard drives in etc. and sold those.
When Xemplar started selling RiscPCs and A7000s, we took a lot of their stock and so we have a history of selling kit to the industry. Eventually, there were no more A3000s, A4000s, A5000s or anything like that so we started selling the current machines; RiscPCs and A7000s. Until the summer of '98, I think we were Acorn's biggest dealer, if not one of Acorn's biggest dealers, selling an awful lot of A7000s into education and RiscPCs as well.
When Stan Boland made his announcement in October, I contacted him via email straight away and asked for a license to continue the manufacture of the Acorn computers. After some negotiations, we were offered the position of distributor because I was told that Acorn would continue to manufacture. Then in January '99 it emerged they were not manufacturing any more A7000s or RiscPCs so we then reverted back to our original request which was to have a license to manufacture A7000s and RiscPCs which was then obviously granted and that's basically led us to the position where we are now.
We now manufacture the A7000 and have upgraded it to have a faster (56MHz) processor in the Odyssey. We build RiscPCs with the faster revision 'T' StrongARM processor and we are looking forward very much to the future.
Although I can't say a lot about what we are doing, I can assure everybody that we are working very hard on future developments. When the products are ready for release we'll tell everybody what we've got.
Alasdair: So what sort of timescale are you looking at for these new products, when will we hear more?
Jack: I can't really talk about that now.
Alasdair: Were Castle at all involved with the 'Steering Group' negotiations?
Jack: No, not at all.
Alasdair: So, do you sell mostly to schools then?
Jack: Nope, at the moment, sales are split fairly equally by thirds. A third go to schools, a third to OEM customers who put them into all sorts of strange things and a third to enthusiasts and businesses.
Alasdair: Why did Castle stick with the Acorn market at the time of Acorn's withdrawal when so many others jumped ship?
Jack: We've always had a fond attachment to the Acorn kit. We strongly believe that the Acorn products, or the RISC OS products as they're now known are excellent and world class. They can challenge any PC in all sorts of areas.
Alasdair: Did you ever consider putting the Phoebe into production?
Jack: We certainly considered it, yes. I think there are better solutions that can be engineered and Phoebe wasn't in a state where it would have been sensible to release her anyway.
Alasdair: Why did you decide to continue the supply of existing machines rather than developing your own hardware?
Jack: I haven't said we're not developing our own machines. However, initially, the market needed to be supplied with computers, we've had extraordinary success selling many more Acorn computers than I thought we were going to since we took on the licenses. It proves that the demand is still very strong for Acorn kit and a long gap between the announcement and any new Acorn machines would have been pretty devastating for the market.
You just have to look at how complicated it is to produce a computer. We're now almost a year from when the first RISC OS computers that weren't Acorn were announced and they're hardly shipping yet.
Alasdair: How many RiscPCs and A7000s have you sold since taking over the Acorn brand name?
Jack: Many thousands.
Alasdair: Roughly what proportion of those were manufactured by yourselves?
Jack: All of them; we only had a small amount of stock from Acorn to start with. All A7000s sold since February of last year were done by us, all RiscPCs from July onwards have been manufactured by us.
Alasdair: Are you planning to provide RISC OS drivers for the DVD drives which are included in some of your machines?
Jack: It's always a chicken and egg situation. There was an opportunity to put DVD drives in and use them as a CD reader which is what we've chosen to do. There's two reasons for doing that; first of all, it gets a lot of DVD drives out into the marketplace and if/as and when someone does write a DVD driver, then there's an instant market for it rather than waiting for users to buy hardware. So it encourages third party developments. I think also that DVD comes into its own for video MPEG except of course, you do need extra hardware for that. So, again, it encourages that development to happen.
There is a price difference [between DVD and CD drives] but it's not huge and it made sense to opt for that. People don't have to have it, they can chose the CD version.
Alasdair: Why have you chosen to take on the Oregano browser rather than using Fresco or Browse?
Jack: Well, there's a number of very good reasons for this. First of all, take Browse; so far as Castle is concerned, Browse is no longer a product which is being supported and is not available in the industry at the moment at all. As far as the ANT Internet Suite is concerned, it is very, very good, it's expensive, and there are question marks about how long it will be supported for in the future.
So far as Voyager is concerned, that's obviously a subset of Fresco and the same thing applies there.
The decision to opt for Oregano was based upon the fact that we do need to have a good browser in the industry. In particular, one to put on our computers because I think everybody these days expects to have a good browser that's supported and we chose talking to Oregan because the product was already developed for the NC. So the porting to RISC OS was a relatively simple job. For example, instead of working in just one window, we've got to get it so it can use multiple windows, we've got to get it working on the desktop, but essentially, because NC OS is a subset of RISC OS, there's not a lot of work to do.
It's a very efficient bit of code, very fast and it will prove its worth once it's out on the market. The release version will also have features that none of the other browsers have so you've got things like FTP fetch and put, which are essential for things like NGFL. It will also have JavaScript but the most important thing is that it's going to be continually supported - there is a route for the future.
Alasdair: How many staff do you employ at Castle?
Jack: Including part-timers, we're twelve at the moment with nine of those being full-time.
Alasdair: How do you feel about companies such as RiscStation and Mico?
Jack: I'm very pleased to see the new companies. It gives us a new focus that we haven't had before, it's good for the industry as people can see that there's alternatives out there. There are benefits still with the old Acorn range though, the fact that you've got a wide range of hardware add-ons that are already up and running and widely available, all the software is 100% compatible because that's what it was designed to run on and the [Acorn] hardware is supported throughout the industry.
Alasdair: Do you have any plans to support software development now that many of the major coders and companies have left?
Jack: I think that we've already shown that we are doing that already with the Oregano browser so where appropriate, we're certainly doing that.
The other thing to mention is that because we license RISC OS 4 from RISCOS Ltd. we've obviously contributing heavily to the work that they're doing as well, which we're very pleased to do. We work very closely with RISCOS Ltd. on a wide range of activities.
Alasdair: Is the development of your range of SCSI interface products still continuing amidst all this system manufacture?
Jack: Yes, infact, not so many weeks ago, there was a new release of the software which was posted up on the internet for people to download free of charge so yes, that continues.
Alasdair: In your opinion, what was the bleakest time in the Acorn market?
Jack: Well, that's quite interesting, I think probably the bleakest time was probably at the end of 1986 when Acorn had a major problem. They rallied out of it which was very interesting. Since then, of course, the decision of October '98 was also a blow to the whole industry and things did get to a very worrying point. I have to say that since November last year, there's been a major upturn and there's much more confidence in the market than there was previously.
Alasdair: ...and the best time?
Jack: For the Acorn industry, I suppose the most exciting time must have been the early 80s. The A3000 was also a very popular machine in schools and there are an awful lot of those around. In fact, the NC was also successful, there's a huge number of those out there. They've been licensed to other manufacturers.
I think it depends upon which industry you're looking at. The education industry has been Acorn's biggest market but the RiscPC didn't sell in the same orders as any other educational machines like the A3020, A3000, Master and the BBC Bs. They sold very nicely to all sorts of other people.
Alasdair: How would you summarise the current mood in the Acorn market?
Jack: Oh, from an all time low a few months ago, the industry has rallied considerably. There's a lot of enthusiasm still in the marketplace and we need to build on the successes and move the industry forward. It is a very new environment for everybody to work in and I think '99 was everybody getting used to the new environment; the year 2000 will see the consolidation of that then we shall hopefully see profits for all the companies involved as time goes by.
Alasdair: What do you see as the future for the RISC OS market as a whole?
Jack: Well, I think potentially, it's got a very good future. It depends how it's handled and I think the important thing is to maintain the reliability which is our number one selling point and we must be very careful that nothing moves us away from that.
Alasdair Bailey