Possibly one of only 2,500 machines, the Hope Dolphin was a licensed BBC Micro from India made by Hindustan Office Products Limited (HOPE).
There is a whole story to be told about this computer, it was purchased by Dilip Roy. His son, Sandeep Roy who arranged the travel for the computer to the UK had this to say.
“Our father was a Visionary. 80s India was a socialist country, some states like mine were banning computerisation for loss of jobs. He basically smuggled this in from another state, during his professional travel. We were 16 and 12 then and the machine got us prepared. This computer speaks about the start of India as an IT hub for the world”
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Technology wise, the machine contains Rockwell chips from America, and unlike the BBC B, there is a single chip for the 32K RAM, and the OS and Basic are also on one chip. Thanks to the hard work of a volunteer, we have managed to read the code off the OS/BASIC chip, the legs were extremely rusty, and seven had to be reconstructed before attempts were made to read it.After several painstaking weeks of work, the code was obtained in its entirety, and found to be identical to what is in the European machines, with the exception of a different name on startup, as seen below through an emulator.
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