Hello,
This shouldn't go against competition rules as this shop is long gone. Years ago, mid 1990's, there was a computer shop just down the road from Manchester Piccadilly train station. It's where I picked up four x 1MB memory chips for my Amiga GVP hard drive. My dad also got his first PC from there, an old 386. Anyways, I can't remember the name of the shop and is annoying the hell out of me. Can anyone remember?
That will have been the old Byte Shop.
Originally they were a small chain, Byte Shop/ComputerLand.
The Manchester branch was definitely on Piccadilly Station Approach.
They went broke in the late '70's and were bought by the Comart Group, based in St Neots, Cambridgeshire.
Manchester
Glasgow
Nottingham
Birmingham
London
Comart also owned Xitan, a software distributor in Southampton, and Bytesoft Systems, a production control software developer in Leicester.
The Comart Group were acquired by Wiltshire-based Kode International PLC in the mid '80s.
KI sold the Byte Shop chain to another shop chain, SCC (Specialist Computer Centres) a year or two later, and itself fairly spectacular imploded around 1990. SCC had their HQ somewhere around Birmingham.
I lost track of SCC and the Byte Shops, but closure in the mid '90s would fit. It might JUST about be that some of the Byte Shop staff set up an independent in the same place for a year or so.
A few years later, SCC tried to revive the name, putting branches in various of the Office World stores
That wasn't successful either.