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In a private room at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago in January 1977, Commodore launched the world's first complete "personal computer" - a microcomputer that for the first time could be taken out of the box, plugged in and used by regular people without a soldering iron. Soon Tandy and Apple joined in, and by the end of the 1970s, they - and hundred of other companies - were selling thousands of microcomputers a year. And it might have gone on like this until Sinclair in the UK, and then Commodore in the US, launched a range of affordable home micros at the start of the new decade which changed everything.
The market exploded from tens of thousands of machines a year to millions, as famous 1970s names like Cromemco, IMSAI, Nascom and MITS were swept away. Micro companies were suddenly worth $1 billion dollars and their employees were millionaires. Hundreds of companies launched hundreds of machines, with 900 mostly-incompatible systems appearing in the 1980 "Guide to Small Business Systems". Price wars were started, old scores were settled and companies were destroyed. 8 bits made way for 16 and 32 in the space of a few years. The video games market surged and then collapsed in on itself, taking out Atari and Coleco. For a while Britain led the world in manufacture and adoption, with 80% of all computers sold in Europe being sold in the UK.
Then the 8-bit market reached saturation and more companies imploded - Sinclair was sold for its name and assets only, Acorn almost didn't make it and a raft of also-rans fell by the wayside - Camputers, Dragon Data, Elan, Oric and Jupiter Cantab to name but a few. Even big names like Timex and Texas Instruments were burned. Of the near-200 companies in these adverts, only 17 remain, of which 15 are the BASFs, Sanyos and Yamahas for whom micros were only ever a sideline. None, including Apple, survives as a pure computer company.
Meanwhile, the sleeping giant that was IBM launched its 5150 at the end of 1981 and watched as it slowly but inevitably over the next few years became the standard. Other companies cloned it, copied and improved it and soon the only game in town was the IBM PC. From the latter half of the 1980s, every micro company and its dog was building generic beige boxes. The "wonder years" were over.
This collection of over 300 adverts attempts to tell something of that story...
November 1991
Der Schnellste PC der Welt - Tut's Auch
This advert from German magazine Der Spiegel continues a frequently-visited meme of microcomputer advertising - that of wheeling in some celebrity with sometimes only a tenuous connection to micros in...
December 1985
BBC External Services
This advert seems to represent the end of a period of retrenchment for Acorn following a difficult year which had seen it bailed out by Italian company Olivetti back in February. For most of the year ...
August 1989
The Archimedes A3000
The A3000 was an update of the original Archimedes - also known in at least some parts of the press as the ARM - which had been launched in 1987 and which first started shipping to dealers in early Au...
May 1984
Introducing Macintosh. What makes it tick. And talk.
Famously introduced by an Orwellian Ridley Scott-directed advert at the 1984 Super Bowl and billed by Steve Jobs as "the fastest and most powerful computer ever placed in the hands of a large number ...
December 1984
Here's an up-front saving on the Tandy 16K Colour Computer 2
Here's a festively-themed advert for the second version of Tandy's Colour Computer, or "CoCo". With £20 off coz it's Christmas, the CoCo was available for only £99.95 - only £320 in 2020 money. Still ...
November 1985
Introducing the new and improved IBM PC. From £49.50
Much has been written about how CP/M, the pioneering, multi-platform operating system written by Gary Kildall and his company Digital Research - originally known as Intergalactic Digital Research and ...
November 1986
The BBC Master Compact: Think of it as a down payment on your child's future uniform
The BBC Master Compact was an entry in the BBC Master series, which in turn was produced as the follow-up to the BBC Model 'B' Micro. It was designed jointly by Acorn and design consultants David Morg...
June 1985
Micronet 800: Nice password, shame about the identity
With an advert containing a theme still relevant to a modern audience - pointing out that "your special identity number and personal password the valuable key to a huge database" - Micronet 800 was a...
4th July 1962
Trad? Not the Elliott 503!
The Elliott 503 was built by Elliott Brothers, a British computer company, as a much faster but software-compatible evolution of the 803 mentioned in the advert. 250 "803" machines were built, of whic...
April 1985
A beginner's guide to the best in business computers
ACT had carved out a briefly-successful niche in the UK with its Apricot range of micros, several of which touted their "Sirius" compatibility, rather than the usual IBM. However, when the company lau...
July 1984
With PCjr, you can add options that haven't even been invented yet
The PCjr, also know by its development code-name of "Peanut" - and variously as Hercules, Sprite, Pigeon and Pancake - was IBM's attempt to crack the home market, which at the time was mostly owned by...
April 1990
The Atari Portfolio - the power of a PC in the palm of your hand!
Sometimes considered as the very first true IBM-compatible portable and originally known as the PocketPC, but eventually christened the Portfolio or Folio (depending upon source) specifically for the ...
November 1987
The new Sinclair has one big disk advantage
Hot on the heels of the Sinclair 128K +2 Spectrum, released in August of this year, came the +3 version, which had the same slightly-non-standard 3" floppy drive that Amstrad used on its other machine...
March 1985
Turn your Spectrum into a Spectrum+ for just £20
1985 was the beginning of the end for Sinclair, at least as far as Uncle Clive was concerned. The company's "next generation" QL, launched in January 1984 but not actually available until April of tha...
January 1979
Introducing the personal computer you've been waiting for: The Exidy Sorcerer
Designed by Paul Terrell as a response to the Commodore PET and the Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80, the frankly-enormous-looking Exidy didn't last for very long in its native US, being cancelled in 1979 - t...