The first working example was produced in less than 3 months, by 3 people, one of whom was taping up the circuit board layout. All 64K of assembler was the work of one man David Collier, and all the hardware design the work of another David, David Lockey. The original decision to use the 8080A 1 MHz processor (already in use by DAI on other products) was forced by the timescale, which itself was dictated by a desire to show the machine to a TI USA board meeting. In the end, only a flight on a Concorde got the machine there on time. However, the slow CPU dictated a huge amount of work on the pre-compiling BASIC and the option for hardware-assisted floating point which might not have been required if the newer Z80 had been chosen.