Dragged down by the fall of Oric, ITL Kathmill has also folded.

ITL supplied the Byte Drive 500 disk system for the Oric micros. The unit appeared well before Oric itself could offer disks for its machines and it attracted several favourable reviews, but ITL was never able to free itself from dependency on Oric by adapting the Byte Drives for other systems.

Earlier this year ITL planned a flotation on the Stock Exchange but, due to lack of confidence by its brokers and Acorn's problems, Oric's collapse and Sinclair's on/off floatation, it fell through.

ITL is reputedly owed more than £100,000 by Oric Products and had trouble with its suppliers as a result of a severe cash-flow crisis. Matters came to a head with a crash on February 20, 1985. There will be a creditors' meeting on March 18 to appoint a liquidator and give notification of some official back-up.

Astrosyn, the holding company of ITL, says that any users who have recently sent machines for repair and have not heard anything back should be helped fairly soon. The back-up, if any, will be supplied by Roland Beaumont who is taking over this side of affairs for the company. Details of this will not be available until the creditors' meeting.

The demise of ITL appears to have been almost wholly caused by Oric going under. The Byte Drive 500 was ITL's only major product although it has had long existing plans for similar devices on the Spectrum, BBC and Commodore 64.