Last Updated 5th May 2019

From Derek Ashton (9/8/02):

As you can see dacc limited was not a short-lived company - we have been in existence for over 20 years now. Our emphasis moved away from the games and mass-market lines of business in late 1995, when the industry became saturated.

We now concentrate on our consulting business but do still produce software - mostly for Project Management and Development (CASE tools, etc.).

If you check our website www.corporateinformationfactory.com you can see what we have been up to since 1995. This site was only just introduced and will be expanded considerably over coming months.

Here is more of the history you may be interested in:

dacc = Derek Ashton Computer Consultants ltd. - the company I formed in 1982 for consulting purposes, having just returned from 2 years in the US.

While in the US I had played around with simple flight simulation formulae on a DEC computer at work. When I got back to the UK I was surprised to see the place had been taken over by small computers (unlike the US) and I set to work on my first marketable version for the Dragon-32. This took-off (pardon the pun) very quickly and I moved on to produce versions for the Tandy Color Computer, BBC, Electron, Spectrum, and several models from the Atari and Commodore ranges.

We sold about 40,000 units of the 747's across these platforms. After this we moved on to the Super-7, Sprite-Gen and the Bobby Charlton Soccer, which took our sales total beyond 50,000.

This (cottage industry) business was doing well at first but as the number of companies entering the market began to rise steeply, it was necessary to increase advertising spend enormously, going into full-page full-color ads at 4,000 pounds a crack. My wife and I wanted to return to the US so we decided to drop from the games scene and concentrate on consulting.

The graphics quality and performance of those programs looks pretty shabby by today's standards but at the time they were very good. Compare the 32K, 1 MHz machines of then to the 2.0GHz, 128Meg PC's of today and its a wonder we got them to do anything. My simulators used genuine trigonometry to calculate the 3-D view and those calculations sucked up cycles like crazy!

The magazines of the day gave very good reviews of our products and we got many letters of praise from buyers. We never received any letters informing us of bugs in those programs, none of them. Do you think Microsoft could make that claim?

I hope this information is of use to you, in fact I would be glad to see you pass the appropriate details on to your audience (that was a big surprise to me, that their are web-sites mentioning my work from 20 years ago). Bye the way, Super-7 was not named after the beer can (which I remember as "Party-7"), it was a name I dreamed up myself.

Please contact me if you have any additional information about the company or its games!

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