It is notable for its chicklet keyboard and models that featured a one-line display, allowing them to be used as a portable computer, in addition to television output.

He asked Radionics employee Christopher Curry to start it up, and in July 1977, Sinclair Instrument was renamed Science of Cambridge Ltd. Around the same time, Curry was introduced to a new small computer designed by Ian Williamson that combined a National Semiconductor SC/MP central processing unit (CPU) with parts from one of Sinclair's calculator designs.

This prompted Curry to leave Science of Cambridge, and partner with Hermann Hauser to form Acorn Computers.

In return, the NEB renamed Radionics to Sinclair Electronics in September and the company was dedicated to bringing the new machine to market.

[1] Newbury gave it the name NewBrain and announced the imminent release of three models, including a battery-powered portable computer.

"[1] In early 1980, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Further Education department conceived the idea of a computer literacy programme, principally in response to the impact of a 1979 six-part ITV documentary series, The Mighty Micro, in which Dr Christopher Evans from the UK National Physical Laboratory predicted the coming (micro) computer revolution.

BBC Engineering was instructed to attempt to draw up an objective specification for a machine that the program could be tailored to, and under pressure from the DoI, they wanted to choose a UK-built system.

The BBC released the specification in 1981, but at this time Newbury was nowhere near ready to go into production as they were having problems with the uncommitted logic arrays (ULAs) that provided much of the customization.

The British Technology Group, which had replaced the NEB by this time, sold the final design and production rights to Grundy.

Grundy had been looking for an entrant into the personal computer business, as they were already producing a CP/M 2.2-based machine, built into a 'dumb terminal' as a virtual clone of the Intertec Superbrain.

Over 50,000 NewBrain units were sold to educational, scientific, industry, small business and banking sectors; as well as to home users.

Scientific use was strong because of the unusually high precision of the NewBrain's floating point computations and its very high-resolution graphics.

[3] Tradecom purchased Grundy Business Systems in 1983 in order to fulfil a contract to supply microcomputers to schools and training centres in the Netherlands.

They created a server to which several NewBrains could use its floppy discs to load programs down the serial cable and simple switching enabled the teacher to view the screen of the students.

A press release was made of a new factory in India to provide NewBrains for the Indian market and to supply Europe, but nothing materialised.

The Dutch NewBrain user group has PDF downloads of various publications and a link to a Greek website that contains a PC-based emulator.

The paged memory system in the expansion chassis used bank switching to allow the NewBrain to take advantage of several 64 kB modules.

The unexpanded NewBrain contains software provided in ROM, primarily BASIC, a full screen editor and device drivers.

This approach did make it easy to write programs that could swap between input and output coming from a screen, keyboard or tape.

The tight fit and labour cost was high on this retrofitting, and the failure of the company in 1983 meant that users were never aware that this was being considered.

The graphics package included commands that could draw dots, lines, arcs, filled-in areas and annotated axes.