The Leonardo arrived in late 1986 in some parts of the world though not in the UK. It was well into 1987 before Eric Hallsworth was able to report on it fully.  A feature rich full sized modular wooden board to rival Mephisto was the hope and expectation. The other pluses seemed to be that Leonardo had a basic program already installed, there was good potential connectivity to PCs and it worked on batteries as well as mains power. The negatives were no display, 16 edge LEDs rather than one LED per square and the basic program was comparatively weak in relation to the cost, features and potential of the board.

It was a while before the modules hit these shores starting with the Maestro 4MHz, then 6MHz, which you see here. The Maestro was available with various processor speeds. As was the Analyst module which has a LCD display. The Brute Force module also works with the Leonardo.

In 1988 the Leonardo was renamed the Galileo for copyright reasons and the machine was upgraded for faster response (for blitz).