A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts
In a private room at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago in January 1977, Commodore showed the world's first complete "personal computer" - the PET 2001 - an "appliance" micro 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 the market grew steadily, but then Commodore and Sinclair launched cheap home computers in the early 80s that 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 incompatible machines. Price wars were started, old scores were settled and companies were destroyed.
Eight bits made way for 16 and 32 in the space of a few years. For a while Britain led the world in manufacture and adoption, with 80% of all computers sold in Europe being sold in the UK.
The fate of many microcomputer companies. From a Business Operating Software advert in Personal Computer World, June 1986.
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.
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, and people wanted the same beige boxes at home and work. The home computer as a concept was dead, and the "wonder years" were over.
This collection of over 300 adverts attempts to tell something of that story...
Hewlett-Packard
January 1983
HP 9000: Today, HP can give you full 32-bit power
At around the same time as HP was dabbling in the mainstream microcomputer market with machines like its HP-86, released in 1982 and which retailed for $2,820, which is about £8,5...
GEC
January 1983
The new GEC 1450 makes building a system child's play.
GEC - or General Electric Company plc - was a large British conglomerate with interests in defence, electronics, communications and engineering. It was founded in 1886, making it ...
Cifer
January 1983
A Graphic Display of Intelligence
Cifer was established in Melksham, Wiltshire in 1972, as a manufacturer of terminals and - later on - microcomputers. According to its advert it became a major supplier in the E...
Cyber Electronics
December 1981
Make friends with Panther... The British micro system
Here's another advert for another fairly generic Z80-based CP/M micro system, from Cyber Electronics Ltd. of Ilford in Essex. Unlike most similar adverts, this one oddly shows no...
Limrose
November 1978
Low cost, expandable Limrose LMC 6800-2
Limrose Electronics was founded in May 1971 by Dr Ravi Raizada as a seller of electronic logic tutors which taught how basic logic gates operated. It went on to release the MTP80...
MOS Technology
September 1975
MOS Technology
The image above is adapted from a Wikimedia public-domain source MOS Technology was founded in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in 1969 by three former employees of General Instrumen...
Scicon
October 1978
The 200 mph micro
Whilst it feels like pretty much every modern car is more computer than motor, the idea of using electronics to manage some or all of a car's engine and performance dates back dec...
RAIR
November 1978
The British Micro: RAIR Black Box Microcomputer
This is probably the first advert to feature RAIR's Black Box - a microcomputer that managed to survive until at least 1983 and which became popular as an OEM machine, cropping up...
Netronics
March 1979
This is the famous ELF II computer
The apparently-famous ELF II from Netronics Research and Development Limited of New Milford, Connecticut, was one of relatively few micros around which used RCA's COSMAC - COmplem...
Acorn
May 1979
Introducing Acorn: A professional MPU card
This is probably Acorn's very first advert - it does indeed say "introducing Acorn" - and appeared just a few months after the company's founding as Cambridge Processor Unit (CPU)...
Triumph-Adler
March 1984
The Alphatronic PC means business
The Alphatronic PC was very much the baby of the Alphatronic family, being a Z80-based 8-bit machine designed and built in Japan to TA's specification, primarily for the home mark...
Zenith Data Systems
December 1991
When you were a child, you didn't like it when the light went out. Are you any different now?
Zenith's notebook micro was based on Intel's CPU of the same name - the 80386SL, which was a variant of the '386 which had been designed specifically for use in portable computers...
Schneider
January 1989
Schneider Computers... Stand out from the crowd!
Alan Sugar sometimes claimed that Amstrad's early success was because it didn't try to crack the European or US market, a move which almost bankrupted Acorn. Eventually though th...
Equinox/Parasitic
October 1986
Our powerful multi-user systems come complete with some new Power Points!
From the days before "Power Point" meant something other than slideshow presentations in tedious meetings on a Friday afternoon, comes this advert from Equinox for its latest mult...
LSI
February 1982
The if 800 - Colour in your computing
The awkwardly-named if 800 from LSI was something of a departure from the company's usual M models - with the System M-Three being around at about the same time - not least becaus...