It is said that behind every insolvency is a sad story. Usually. Businesses, particularly in the volatile cauldron of the computer industry, come and go every year (and in some cases the people behind the ones coming are also behind the ones that have just gone, but we’ll leave that…) and most of the companies that go are usually soon forgotten – although there are a few exceptions.

One such exception is/was ZCL, who went into receivership four years ago this week 'blaming' Commodore. ZCL, you see, were one of the distributors who supplied the UK’s independent retailers with Amiga computers, and as Commodore itself had gone pear-shaped the year before, the lack of Amigas meant ZCL no longer had a product to sell; hence their demise. Or at least that was ZCL's story.

The reality was rather different. Two years earlier, ZCL had asked their biggest independent retail customers to join them in a branding exercise called Calculus. The retailer paid a few hundred pounds per month and had preferential access to stock, slightly cheaper prices and a corporate identity which ZCL advertised in consumer magazines – "visit your local Calculus store for these deals etc" - there was a telephone number to call which told the reader the location of their nearest Calculus store. It sounded good, so many retailers duly signed up to be Calculus stores.

And it was good, until ZCL, in a classic Trojan Horse manoeuvre, then started opening stores of their own – also called Calculus – and competing with their own customers, in the same town in certain cases. Of course, these new stores also benefited from the national advertising and branding that the independent retailers were paying for. Smart. Astonishingly ZCL, who clearly thought of ethics as a place you pass through on the way to suthics (sic), then twisted the knife a little further into their customers’ backs by opening their own mail order operation called Indi, which offered the same kit as Calculus, but 'off the page' to end users and at even cheaper prices.

Not surprisingly, retailers deserted the Calculus operation, and the parent company, in droves and started sourcing products from other suppliers. So when ZCL collapsed, citing the lack of Commodore hardware, there was very little weeping on their behalf. As I recall, the only emotion going around was what the Germans call schaudenfreude. For those of you into Business Studies, the moral of this story is - if you're going to screw your customers, don’t take the piss as well…

(Sorry for the heavy tone of this missive, I'll get back to some serious ephemera next week).