| I closed
Peaksoft to complete my retirement at the end of the
financial year in April 2022 - 40 years after founding
the firm and 13 years after leaving the full-time job
that had been providing the daily bread when Peaksoft had
become a labour of love. The
Peaksoft Story, which appears below, was written while
the enterprise was still in operation. Some of the verb
tenses are therefore wayward, but editing them would have
detracted from the essence of the account.
Long, long before the
PeakSoft Corporation were flogging their software in the
States, the original Peaksoft was offering its quality
products to the discriminating gentry in the UK. Now read
on....

A potted history of

By HARRY WHITEHOUSE
Back in 1981, I'd never
really seen a computer at close quarters for very long.
I used to administer the
annual Mensa competition for the newspaper in
Burton-on-Trent for which I was then working, and Mensa's
president, a man called Clive Sinclair, donated the first
prize...a ZX81 home computer.
I tried to persuade myself
that if I took it out of the box for a quick test drive,
the winner would never know. But I chickened out.
In October, 1982, I spent
£199 on a Dragon 32, swayed by the advertisements for
its "massive" 32k memory, and a keyboard
guaranteed to survive two million keystrokes. I also
bought a couple of pieces of software, written in Basic
and saved on cassette tape. By the time I'd read the
manual, I'd decided that I could do better. (That's a
comment on the quality of the software, not on my
ability.)
In
common with many Basic programmers before me, my first
effort was an appalling hangman game, for which I typed
in a bank of 1,000 place names and 1,000 football topics.
I had the nerve to advertise it for £5.45 in Popular
Computing Weekly and sold a few copies. These were
produced on the dining table with a Dragon and a cassette
recorder, then labelled with typewritten stickers.
I followed this up with
Death's Head Hole (a cave rescue simulation) and
Lionheart, an awful low-resolution graphics adventure.
Both of these were sold through another advertisement,
and by writing to the people who had bought the hangman
game.
Champions!
In the spring of 1983, I
wrote a program which was to change my life. It was a
football management game. Because I knew so little about
programming, I kept it simple, with only four teams in
each division, and the crudest league table sorting
imaginable. Addictive Games had produced a very
successful game called Football Manager for the Spectrum,
so I needed a different name, and I settled on Champions!
The
cassette case insert had a black and white Press
photograph taken at Burton Albion's Southern League
ground.
By the judicious use of
Tippex to obscure as many clues as possible, I hoped no
one would realise that the picture in the Press
advertisement was of the captain of a non-league team
holding aloft the league trophy.
In my innocence, I did not
realise the attractions of a football management game,
and in its first advertisement, in Your Computer, I gave
it second billing to Death's Head Hole. However, the
orders, when they came, were for Champions!
The
first cassette labels were all hand-typed.
At this point, I nearly
made a huge mistake. Salamander Software, who despite the
appalling quality of their software, were the number two
Dragon sellers to Microdeal, offered to market
Champions!, and I was very tempted. Fortunately, I
resisted their offer.
I needed a follow-up, and
dashed off another low resolution graphics adventure,
called SAS. This one was the first to feature a little
machine code. I didn't understand a byte of it, but I
copied it from a magazine listing to simulate machine gun
fire. I then went away on holiday for two weeks, and on
my return, I could not find a single copy of SAS. It was
rewritten from scratch in ten days.
Boots
were the leading stockists of Dragon computers, so I
wrote to their head buyer. As a result, in November 1983
they ordered £27,000-worth of tapes from me. In 2024,
that would be about £115,000.
I bought a second
Dragon and set to work duplicating them. I sat up late at
night, saving every single ordered copy from those two
computers. As I wasn't paying professional duplicators,
all but about £1,000 of that order was pure profit.
In the same month, my
employers were taken over, and the new owners wanted to
give my job to one of their employees on another
newspaper. I accepted a few thousand pounds to go away
quietly.
As soon as I returned home
(this had all happened within the space of a few hours) I
started looking for another job, but after mulling it
over for a few days, my wife Maureen and I agreed that I
should spend two months seeing if I could make a
full-time job of Peaksoft.
A friend of mine, Gordon
Smith, had a BBC Model B computer. (When Acorn produced
the BBC machine, they intended that the main one should
be their £299 Model A, with 16k RAM, as, in one of the
most misjudged Press statements of all time, they said:
"Few home computer users will ever require to use
more than 16k.") The public felt otherwise, and the
32k £399 Model B was the top seller.
Gordon rewrote Death's
Head Hole for the BBC, and I advertised in the local
newspaper to recruit someone to rewrite it for the 48k
Spectrum. Both Gordon and the chap who did the Spectrum
rewrite worked on a royalties-only basis. At the time, I
couldn't accept that the bubble would not burst very
quickly, and I was squirrelling away every penny
possible, rather than investing in new machines myself.
Soon after, we moved to
Queen Street, Balderton, Nottinghamshire, which was to
remain the home of Peaksoft for more than 20 years. A
spare bedroom was changed into an office, and the
entrance to the integral garage was bricked up to provide
a storeroom with access from the house.
I began advertising in
Dragon User magazine, which brought in more customers,
and four people submitted their own games to me - one was
a simple machine code game called Ossie, featuring an
osprey which had to catch fish by diving into a pool,
another other was a horse-race simulation, which I named
Photo-Finish, the third was a package of two text
adventures, which I called Don't Panic!, and the fourth
was a ZX81 machine code game, Octopussy, which,
amazingly, needed only 1k of Ram.
As a result of the
appearance of this page, I received an email from Tony
Evans, the programmer of Photo-Finish, who emigrated to
South Africa, where he now supplements his income with a
horse race result prediction service.
Two great
characters
Among the rewards in
running Peaksoft were the opportunities it gave me to
meet some wonderful people. Leading the pack were two
great characters, Tim Love, and Martin Cleghorn (of whom
more later).
Tim
had been on holiday in India. On the long flight back, he
began coding a game which I always regarded as a work of
genius, and which I called, quite simply, Tim Love's
Cricket.
It came to me in the post,
out of the blue, and one of my real regrets is that I
never managed to secure for Tim the rewards his work
deserved.
Most of the coding for the
Dragon game was in Basic, but he managed to write a
cricket game in which batting, bowling and fielding were
under joystick control, using very impressive batting
graphics. For its time, it set a precedent, providing
Dragon owners with a cricket game far better than
anything available on the Spectrum or Commodore 64, the
machine's more popular competitors. Home Computing Weekly
awarded it 100% for graphics, playability and value.
I was so impressed with
the game that I invested heavily on the packaging and
presentation. Unfortunately, the chain retailers had
begun to realise that their expectations for the level of
Dragon software sales had been unrealistic, so it never
appeared on the shelves of Boots, WH Smith and John
Menzies.
Tim made one slip in the
programming, and my bug-testing failed to spot it before
I started shipping the game. By hitting the ball in a
certain way, it was possible to make it go through the
boundary. Unfortunately, fielders could not pass through
the boundary, so the player was stuck, unable to continue
with the game.
This
was soon solved, but not before my wife, Maureen, and I
began to dread the ringing of the telephone. Everyone, it
seemed, wanted to tell us that their ball was stuck on
the wrong side of the boundary.
I introduced a further
problem. Tim had used several USR calls, and when the
Dragon 64 was introduced, the syntax was changed. In my
innocence, I did not know that a single line of code
wouldl enable the program to distinguish between the two
machine, so I introduced a line of Basic which read:
"Do you have:
- 1 A Dragon 32
- 2 A Dragon 64
The intention was that the
user should press "1" or "2", which
would then be interpreted by INKEY$.
Unfortunately, some users
entered "32", to indicate that they had a
Dragon 32. INKEY$ rejected the "3", then
accepted the "2" as indicating that the machine
was a Dragon 64. I learned very quickly that bug-testing
should always be done by people who do not know how the
program is supposed to work.
Tim assured me that the
game made no Rom calls. However, when I tried to convert
it for theTandy Co-Co, I discovered that this was a
terminological inexactitude. As I had no literature
available, I started the mind-squelching task of
searching through the Co-Co Rom for sequences of code
that were identical to those called by Tim on the Dragon.
I achieved it and sold precisely four copies..
I did not meet Tim for
several weeks after receiving his game, but he moved from
his native Portsmouth to Nottingham, and we then came to
know each other very well. He is now Computer Officer for
the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University
which, I trust, means that the massive royalties I failed
to secure for him have not proved to be of too great a
consequence.
At that time, the credit
card companies were much stricter about allowing
merchants - particularly mail order ones - to use their
services. In order that I could accept telephone orders,
I advertised a free cash on delivery service. This was
very expensive, and I have never seen a similar offer by
any other firm. The Post Office insists that any COD item
is sent by registered post, so in all, it cost me almost
£3 for each COD copy I sent.
This was, however, better
than making a sale through a distributor. They, and major
retail chains, demand a 55% discount. Few people realise
that when they pay £8.95 for an item (the retail price
of Tim Love's Cricket) it might have cost the vendor only
£3.50 + VAT.
I knew that the Dragon
market was limited, so I encouraged Tim to convert it to
another format. He chose the Commodore 64, and promptly
sat down to learn CBM64 assembler from scratch. I think I
had the finished game in my hands within about three
months.
Having done
that, he rewrote it for the Amstrad CPC464. We had hoped
to have a Spectrum version, but two separate independent
programmers wasted a lot of our time and eventually
produced nothing. Pictured is the insert card...ready for
the game that was never produced.
The Boss
The
obvious next step seemed to be to develop Champions (I
can't keep pedantically adding the exclamation mark!) for
other machines. I'd already rewritten it for the Spectrum
and the ZX81, and Gordon had adapted it for the BBCB.
However, I
had finally figured out how to do a passable sort
routine, which allowed me to expand the number of teams
in a division from four to 12 (the maximum number that I
could fit on a Dragon screen) and so New Champions was
born.
On the
Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad 464 (have Basic
manual, will program!) I could now have 20 teams per
division, and with all that extra memory, there was no
stopping me.
To be
accurate, the first version - for the CBM 64 - of The
Boss (as Champions was renamed for every computer except
the Dragon and the Tandy Co-Co) was written before I
discovered efficient sorting, so that had only four teams
per division. I overcame this handicap with great
packaging, inserting the tape into a card cut-out, which
was fitted into a large box and colour sleeve, together
with a blank save game tape. The instructions were
printed in blue on glossy paper. It looked great, and it
sold for £8.95.
For the
first time, the tapes were professionally duplicated, and
not individually copied on my dining room table. I didn't
know anything about compression, so the program took
eight minutes to load.
Boots
thought the box looked wonderful, so I took lots more
£3.50s off them.
The fact
that the tapes were duplicated did not mean, however,
that my little cottage industry had no part in the
production. Each box was assembled by hand, and stuck
together with double-sided sticky tape, each tape was
manually inserted, and each instruction booklet was
personally stapled by yours truly.
Versions
of The Boss followed for the many machines listed below.
Throughout its very long sales life, it was continually
improved. The most feature-packed version was eventually
produced for the Spectrum, but I, my son and my daughter
used to play it until late 1996 on an Amstrad 664, which
was slightly less complex, but which played much faster.
No one is quicker to rubbish my work than myself, so I
believe that entitles me to take some satisfaction from
the final versions of The Boss.
When retail shop
sales virtually ended, I still continued selling by mail
order through football magazines, then I made a few
thousand pounds more by licensing Alternative Software to
issue budget versions. They renamed it Soccer Boss, and
for one wonderful week, it was number 1 in the UK sales
chart.
The
versions for machines other than the Dragon had the very
considerable benefit of a save game routine. When I first
wrote the Dragon version, I could not understand the
manual's instructions on data saving, so the early users
suffered the frustration of starting in Division 4 every
time, or leaving their computers switched on!
The shows
I loved
the Dragon shows. The first ones were run by Microdeal,
the leading Dragon software house, at the New
Horticultural Halls, London. I used to hire a van (or on
occasions, just hitch a trailer onto my car) and drive
down the previous night. I would then sleep in the
van/car, as a basic security precaution...and because it
was more fun that way.
Microdeal
also organised one in Manchester, but after that, most of
the organising was to the credit of John Penn, a mail
order software retailer.
We had
some excellent times at Ossett Town Hall, Yorkshire
(where I had a hard time persuading the caretaker that he
wouldn't get the sack for allowing me to connect my
Dragon to Prestel) and Cardiff Airport. John also
organised a couple of London shows, in which I was a
sleeping partner, as the venues wanted quite a large cash
deposit.
My
practice of travelling down the night before and sleeping
in the van caused a problem when John organised a show at
the Connaught Rooms in central London in December, 1987.
When I went to collect the hire van, I discovered to my
horror that they had no panel vans left, and the only
available one had windows along both sides. I parked in a
busy London street, with boxes piled against the windows,
leaving a narrow alley in which I put my sleeping bag.
Usually, I
ran my stand single-handed, which meant that for a couple
of hours in the mornings, I was rushed off my feet, with
irate people reasonably demanding to know when I was
going to serve them, while in the afternoon, I had no one
to talk to! At one show, I was helped by a police
inspector called Gary, who contacted me and volunteered
his services on Prestel, and my daughter Louise
accompanied me to one of the Ossett shows.
Odds and
ends take over
It was at
the shows that I began to realise that people were more
interested in buying odds and ends and peripherals than
software. I started to comb the market for cassette
leads, aerial leads, dust covers - anything, in fact,
that a Dragon owner might need.
Many
youngsters, having bought a Dragon, were disappointed to
find that the joystick interface did not support the
switching type, which felt so much more satisfactory with
arcade-type games. There were several interfaces on the
market, but as with most Dragon suppliers, the people
marketing them tended to come and go, as the demand was
too small to support such limited specialisation.
I realised
that by offering as wide a range as possible of Dragon
items, all of these small specialised products could
possibly add up to a worthwhile business.
I bought
one firm's remaining stock of printed circuit boards for
joystick interfaces. I paid piecework rates to two men,
who had full-time jobs at a local electronics factory, to
build the interfaces in their spare time, first using the
PCBs, then copying the design manually onto pieces of
board.
The
Dragoniser was born. The process was too expensive for me
to be able to sell the interfaces at a reasonable price,
while making a profit, so I sold them only as complete
units with joysticks.
Many
people began to experience problems with the Dragon
transformer. Some of these difficulties arose through
simple failure of the unit itself, and others through the
insecurity of the wiring in the plug that joined the
transformer cable to the Dragon. Wires tended to come
loose and cause a short circuit.

LEFT: Flan marks the
sale of Tim Love's Cricket to an Icelandic distributor.
In my
innocence, I thought that I could simply buy new
transformers in bulk from a wholesaler, then pay my
moonlighters to bung them in plastic boxes and wire them
up. However, I soon discovered that the Dragon
transformer is a rare beast, which must be specially
built and even finding suitable boxes took a week and
cost a fortune in telephone calls.
I
discovered Douglas Electronics in Louth, Lincolnshire,
who, I learned, had built the Dragon Data disc drive
transformer, as well as the mains adapter for the
Sinclair Spectrum. The company told me that Dragon Data
insisted on almost re-inventing the wheel by designing
the transformer from scratch, instead of using tried and
trusted designs, and that this had doubled the cost of
the finished product.
Douglas
built new transformers for the computer for me, in
batches of 50. I was incapable of soldering the cable to
the Dragon's connector, so I farmed out the assembly work
to local moonlighters. I told Douglas that I wanted a
transformer that with luck, could never give cause for
complaint. In the event, it worked happily with the D32,
D64 and Dragon Plus, and no claim was ever made under the
guarantee. I even managed to source a more satisfactory
plug, which did not either shear the wiring if it was too
tight, or allow it to be jerked out if it was too loose.
At the end
of 1985, the Dragon accessory business really took off.
Sunshine Publications, who produced Dragon User magazine,
were left with thousands of £6.95 books that they could
not sell. They invited me to buy some, and I agreed to do
so, on condition that I could have them all, as I did not
want anyone to undercut me. We settled on the price of
10p a copy.
I had
vaguely planned to store them in my dining room, but on
the night before they were due to arrive, I awoke in the
middle of the night with a terrifying premonition. I got
up, measured a book, multiplied this by several thousand,
and discovered that the consignment would fill the room
five times over. Early next morning, I rented space in a
local warehouse, and redirected the juggernaut that was
delivering the books.
After a
mail shot to existing customers, I began selling them at
£6.95 for five, post paid, and soon recovered my outlay.
The hundreds of left-over copies were eventually covered
with top soil and used to correct an inconvenient slope
in my garden. That should puzzle archeologists of the
future.
Touchmaster,
the successors to Dragon Data, supplied me with
potentiometer joysticks, which were essential for Tim
Love's Cricket and Microdeal's Worlds of Flight. I became
their sole outlet for these joysticks, and even supplied
them as a wholesaler to John Penn and my friend Harry
Massey at Computape.
Touchmaster
had been trying to sell a graphics tablet (of that name)
for about £135. As might be expected, there were few
takers, so Touchmaster stopped production. I did a deal
which allowed me to take over their stock and sell the
tablets profitably for £35 each. I acquired these just
in time for the 6809 Show in London at the end of 1985,
and sold all of the stock I had taken within 30 minutes.
In May,
1986, Touchmaster sent a circular letter to Dragon
dealers, inviting bids for their remaining stock of
uncased disk drives, spare keyboards, joysticks,
software...the lot! Peaksoft were by now the only firm
with a sufficient breadth of interest in the Dragon to
contemplate making the financial investment that seemed
to be required.
Everyone
else shied away, so I was able to hire a lorry, drive it
to South Wales, and fill it for less than £1,800. As I
had already arranged in advance to sell the software to a
dealer for £2,000, that was a very profitable day's
work.
My
knowledge of disk drives was limited to knowing which
hole to stick the disk in, so I definitely did not want
to be faced with any technical problems. To avoid this, I
sold the drives as door stops for £39.95 each, and
advised purchasers that with just a little good fortune,
their door stop would turn out to be a serviceable disk
drive.
The
keyboards - Dragon 64 type - were also snapped up for
£24.95.
Comms -
1986 style
Many
people fail to appreciate that computers were talking to
each other long before the internet revolution.
Back in
the mid-1980s, we had Micronet, Prestel and bulletin
boards. Micronet had 400,000 pages, accessible via a
local phone call, using a 1200/75 modem. In case that
hasn't quite sunk in, that means we sent at 75 and
received at 1200, as opposed to today's common 33,600.
British Telecom would not accept that the equipment
available to a home user was capable of sending at more
than 75bps.
The system
offered messaging similar to email, and was very popular,
until British Telecom killed it stone dead by introducing
a 1p a minute service charge.
I acquired
some modems from a firm called Modem House, together with
a comms cartridge. When these ran out, Martin Cleghorn, a
bobby from the Lake District, contacted me. He designed a
new interface with a through cartridge port (to allow
users to keep their disk drive interfaces connected, for
example). He wrote a program, I bought him a gizmo to
allow him to burn it onto an eprom, and we were off and
running again.
I became
rather carried away, and launched Radio Dragon. This was
a very substantial electronic magazine, stored on a
3-inch disk on an Amstrad CPC 664. At set times in the
week, Dragon owners could dial my telephone number, which
would be answered by the Amstrad. The magazine took about
three minutes to download into RAM, for viewing at
leisure or saving to cassette. It was great fun while it
lasted (for six issues) but it was very hard work for no
real return. Martin wrote all of the software for the
service.
By the end
of 1986, we were selling an extraordinary range of
products for the Dragon. A Dragon User advertisement of
the time offers thermal printers for £59.95, modems,
joysticks, light pens, T-shirts, sweat shirts, car
stickers (as shown at the top of the page), books, power
supplies, disk drive transformers, aerial, cassette and
printer leads, dust covers, data recorders, carry cases,
keyboards, magazines and monitors. We boasted: "We
probably have the world's largest range of Dragon
accessories."
I made
many friends among my regular customers. One father and
son wrote several upgrades of Champions for the Dragon
64, and sent copies to me, and I had several gratifyting
exchanges of correspondence with other people.
Looking
through my copies of Dragon User, I am amazed to see how
many firms came and went, often in the space of a few
months. One software house boasted in a Dragon User
feature that it was "number three behind Microdeal
and Salamander". Three months later, the partners
saw me before a show in London in a state of desperation,
and I agreed to get them off the financial hook by buying
their entire stock of software for a knock-down price. I
sold what I could at the show, then sold the rest to John
Penn at cost.
Power
play
I heard
that Commodore 64 power supplies were proving rather
unreliable, so I decided to investigate this market. It
was impossible to inspect the design of the originals, as
they were encased in resin, so I asked one of my
moonlighters to design a new one from scratch. His first
attempt used a voltage regulator, which proved
unsuitable, but his next effort was a winner.
At the
heart of it was a transistor, and the design proved to be
rermarkably reliable. The CBM64 used a non-standard plug
for attachment to the computer, but I discovered that it
was possible to achieve the same result by pulling two of
the pins from a 7-pin DIN plug.
This power supply sold
very well. I offered a two-year warranty and a lifetime
service guarantee, so it was advertised with the slogan:
"The last power supply you'll ever need -
guaranteed!"
I recognised that the
Dragon business was running down, and I saw the
diversification into power supplies as the opportunity to
maintain my independence. With simple ones - such as the
straightforward 9v units used by Spectrums, Commodore 16s
and Electrons - I could even trust myself to do the
soldering!
One of my biggest single
customers was a shop in Leicester, called Cavendish
Commodore Supplies. They suddenly wanted 200 units, and
my faithful moonlighters simply couldn't produce them in
the time required.
I handed one of our power
supplies to Douglas Electronics, who were one of my
transformer suppliers, and asked them to build 200 to the
same design.
Unfortunately, Douglas
decided they knew better, built them with voltage
regulators, and then encased the internal parts in resin.
I was not aware of this, so I accepted the power
supplies, and sent them to Cavendish.
Within four weeks, they
had all been returned to me, as most of the first batch
sold by Cavendish had failed, and, understandably, they
had no faith in the remainder.
Alan Sugar, meanwhile, had
taken over Sinclair, and he introduced the Spectrum
Plus-3 - a Spectrum with a 3-inch disc drive. There was a
stereo socket to provide an interface for a taped
programs, and this provided another market opportunity
for me, as there were no leads available to link the
stereo socket to the input and output sockets on a
cassette deck.
I had to get into the
market before someone imported a million from the Far
East, so each lead was hand-soldered, dropped into a
freezer bag from rolls bought from local supermarkets,
then stapled to a card run off by a jobbing printer in
his garden shed. Surprisingly, the end product looked
very good.
The end
As the
figures below reveal, business began to plummet in the
late 1980s, simply because I could not find anything to
sell. In 1988, with a young family to support, I realised
I would have to sacrifice my independence, in order to
secure a reliable income.
The
telephone stopped ringing during the spring, and I
decided to find a job after the school summer holidays.
Much of that year was spent self-indulgently cycling the
local country lanes, before a three week family holiday
in France.
In September, I put my
jacket and tie on again and joined a local newspaper.
Peaksoft had provided me
with a great deal of fun. It paid off my mortgage and
allowed me to invest enough money to help my family to
live a little more comfortably over the years.
If another chance arose
tomorrow, would I take it? Not half!
Meanwhile, if you ever see
a car with a "I love my Dragon sticker" in the
back window (just like the one at the top of this page),
the driver will probably be me. So for old time's sake,
please give me a toot.
In 1999, the upstart (but
rather rich at the time) PeakSoft of Massachusetts, USA,
suddenly became aware that I had a prior claim to the
name - by about 15 years. They sent me an email, asking
rather anxiously if I intended to sue them, as they had
already had to change their name once after treading on
another company's toes.
I assured them that if
they didn't call themselves PeakSoft in the UK, I would
turn a blind eye to their usurpation of my trading
name.
I noticed in 2003 that
they now seemed to have gone down the tubes, and
peaksoft.com is being held on retention.
I'm very much attached to
the Peaksoft brand, and I'm forever playing with ideas
about new goods I could market.
Towards the turn of the
millennium, I discovered Ebay, and later also hooked up
with Amazon. Through these outlets and my own
merchandise page, Peaksoft is still in business.
Initially, I sold hundreds
of Shire special interest books, and other books sourced
through remainder shops through Ebay, but the growth of
Amazon gradually reduced demand.
In 1998, I started a website (now transferred to the care of the fan
club) commemorating the 60s pop singer Billy Fury.
It was meant to be a token few pages to give me some
experience in web design, but somehow, it took off.
As a result of this, I
organised a weekend festival in Newark in 2003, and this
led to Peaksoft's first CD release, a double tribute
album called Without You.
Other items of memorabilia
followed, and I also began retailing 60s books published
by Finbarr International. Peaksoft broke into
publishing on its own account when I reprinted the 50s
teen adventure Dead Man's Cave by Conon Fraser, then a
book of Killer Sudoku puzzles.
Other CDs, including the
release of several newly discovered Billy Fury tracks,
and the first British album by the Canadian skiffle king,
Lew Dite, followed.
  
In 2010 Peaksoft CD
releases included The Complete Dickie Pride (PEA007),
Billy Fury: The Complete Parlophone Singles (PEA009) with
the cooperation of the Billy Fury Estate, and in 2011 The
Road To Paradise (PEA010), a collection of Billy Fury
early years tracks, endorsed by the singer's
mother. National distribution was secured for
these, and future Peaksoft releases.
In 2008, Peaksoft moved to
Scarborough, its present home.
CD releases
2003 PEA001 Without You
2006 PEA002 Dreaming
2009 PEA003 Lew Dite Skiffle
2009 PEA004 Love Don't Let Me Down, Johnny Storme
(single)
2009 PEA005 Billy Fury early years (free promotional CD)
2009 PEA006 Christmas album
2010 PEA007 The Complete Dickie Pride
2010 PEA008 Fit For A King, Colin Paul
2010 PEA009 The Complete Parlophone Singles, Billy Fury
2011 PEA010 The Road To Paradise, Billy Fury
2011 PEA011 Larry Parnes Extravaganza
2011 PEA012 Songs To Change The World
2011 PEA013 Arturo Toscanini: Tchaikovsky
2012 PEA014 Billy Fury: The Lost Album
2012 PEA015 Britain's Cpmplete Number 1s, 1952-6
2013 PEA016 Duane Eddy: Complete UK Hits 1958-62
2013 PEA017 Don Lang: Frantic Rock
2013 PEA018 Mercy Mercy Percy: Black rock pioneers in
Briatin
2013 PEA019 Dave van Ronk: Bluesmaster
2013 PEA020 Tom Rush: The Unicorn Sessions
2014 PEA021 Blood Brothers (PEA002 and PEA007, plus
bonuses)
2016 PEA022 Billy Fury: The Missing Years plus studio
masters (double CD)
2016 PEA023 Caprock Classics
2016 PEA024 Danny Rivers: Can't You Hear My Heart
(complete recordings)
2017 PEA025 The Unforgettable Billy Fury - The Five
Classic Albums
2017 PEA026 Terry Dene: Rock Rebel
2017 PEA027 Raring To Rock: Dave Sampson, Jimmy Crawford
and Lance Fortune
2017 PEA028 The Peter Wynne Story
2018 PEA029 The Michael Cox Story
2020 PEA30 LittleTony The Rock And Roll Years
Total software sales
HANG IT!
Dragon 182.
DEATH'S HEAD HOLE
Dragon 426, BBC B 312,
Spectrum 90. Total 828.
LIONHEART
Dragon 5572
DON'T PANIC
Dragon 328.
SAS
Dragon 4066
CHAMPIONS!/THE BOSS
Dragon 8119, CBM64 7423,
Spectrum 5645, Electron 2333, C16/Plus 4 2028, MSX 1346,
BBC B 1031, Amstrad 464/664 857, ZX81 464, Oric 398.
Total 29644.
OCTOPUSSY
ZX81 150
PHOTO-FINISH
Dragon 804, Tandy CoCo 11.
Total 815.
OSSIE
Dragon 991, BBC B 171.
Total 1162.
GULP!
BBC B 130.
TIM LOVE'S CRICKET
Dragon and Co-Co 4518,
CBM64 1960, Amstrad 464/664 789. Total 7267.
Total software sales:
50144
Power supplies
| Dragon
367 |
CBM
64 1485 |
Spectrum
172 |
Electron
207 |
| C16
101 |
Plus-4
48 |
Misc
1 |
|
Dragon
links
Paul Burgin
Graham Kinns
Other links
Tim Love's page
Email me
|