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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...
June 1987
Atari 520STM: To help you destroy the aliens, we've massacred the price
The Atari 520STM was fundamentally the same machine as the previous ST model, except that it came with a built-in TV modulator and had its OS and GEM graphics manager supplied in ROM. The "special off...
April 1985
Instead of computers catching up with technology, technology now has to catch up with a computer
In the summer of 1982, one-time Olympic chess player and former chess grandmaster David Levy, of Intelligent Software - a company best known for producing programs like Cyrus IS Chess, written by Rich...
October 1984
Kaypro: The last word in portable micros
Built by Non-Linear Systems but designed by an out-sourced circuit design consultant as a direct competitor to the Osborne 1, the Kaypro II - Roman-numeralled like the Apple II - was for a while a hig...
December 1984
Olivetti - Compatibility plus!
Along with almost every major manufacturer of the time, Olivetti was not one to refuse a spot on the bandwagon that was the IBM PC format, here offering an 8086 "true 16 bit" PC clone, although with a...
July 1987
The new IBM Personal System/2. Marry into the future without divorcing the past.
By 1986, IBM seemed to be suffering, possibly from the rise of the clones of its original IBM 5150 (the "PC"), but possibly also because it had slowed down product releases in the PC market it had cre...
December 1984
On average, there is one new software package written for the IBM Personal Computer every day
IBM's original PC - the 5150 - had been the machine that spawned a whole new era of generic, dull and identi-kit computers which ended up trouncing everything that had gone before. However, this was n...
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...
February 1985
Ask an expert why the Electron's the best micro in its class
Another advert for the Acorn Electron, the cut-down version of the BBC Micro. In common with many other Electron adverts, it stresses the fact that it's mostly the same as the expensive £400 BBC Micro...
July 1985
"All you need to do this, is this: The Commodore 128 and 64"
Officially launched at the 1985 January Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and built with the same case used for the late-model C64s, the Commodore 128 was the company's last 8-bit computer. Even ...
November 1987
Z88: Buying a powerful personal computer is no longer a big issue. Or a big deal.
After the financial turmoil bought on by the QL fiasco - late delivery, dodgy early firmware and the curse of the Microdrive - together with other disasters like the Pocket TV and the C5, developed by...
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...
February 1987
"New Amiga 500 - Now other home computers are just toys"
The original Amiga, or A1000 as it came to be known, nearly didn't make it when it launched in 1986, as Commodore was going through some major financial problems whilst its potential saviour machine w...
January 1977
Introducing Sol Systems - A complete computer/terminal concept
First shipped only one month before the date of this advert, in December 1976, the Sol-20, designed by Lee Felsenstein, was an S-100-based system which offered a range of CPU options (according to the...
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 ...
December 1986
Programming the 68000 by Metacomco
St Pauls, Bristol-based Metacomco had been quietly writing system software and compilers for the Motorola 68000 processor, and had also previously licenced its own 8086 Basic interpreter for $800,000 ...