A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

They're both analytical and calculating

It's not that common for microcomputer adverts to get political, but this one from Victor is getting stuck right in, with a comment on the lack of action for small businesses from...

Zorba: The portable personal with more

This almost-comedy wannabe hack at the Osborne and Kaypro market, with its claim that cramming 80 columns on to a 7" screen is somehow a good thing, appeared in 1983 and was consi...

Apricot Collection starts where others finish - then GEM gives you more

This is an advert for an Apricot bundle - the "collection" - which includes the F2 micro, a monitor, printer, keyboard and a tracker-ball mouse. The whole lot came together with...

Gemini: Pick a disk... any disk

Gemini had been founded by John Marshall shortly after the receivers had been sent in to his former company Nascom - builder of what was once Britain's most popular kit computer, ...

The Tandata PA - Data/voice communicating workstation

Tandata originally formed out of Tangerine, which produced a single-board computer called the Microtan 65. By 1984 it had become Tandata Holdings PLC, with Tandata Marketing Limit...

Casio PB-100: The best way to put 1,568 steps in your pocket

Casio's PB-100 was one of several small "pocket computers" released around the same time that look more like calculators, however it was programmable as it had a resident version ...

From Clive Sinclair: The No-Compromise Z88 Computer

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 an...

RM Nimbus: Success breeds success

After selling what seems like the same machine since forever, or at least 1977 - the Research Machines 380Z - RM has finally stepped into the world of the IBM PC. Except that it'...

Introducing the new PC Quattro from ICL

The multi-user ICL Quattro - so-called because it could support up to four users - was a development of the RAIR Black Box - the machine which ICL had already used as its first "I...

Not another new company with a personal computer

Branding itself as a "new" company, ITT had actually been around for a while. It was already famous for its ITT 2020 microcomputer of 1979 - the first official clone of the Apple ...

The new TI Professional Computer. If you want the business edge, it's the answer

Just a few months before Texas Instruments announced that due to poor sales of its TI99/4A home micro it was exiting the consumer and home-computer business, comes this advert for...

Victor: The power to control won't cost you the Earth

From a somewhat baffling advert featuring a raging dude who looks like a cross between Bill Bixby as David Banner and Lou Ferigno as the Hulk in the 80s TV series The Incredible H...

Type and Talk Speech Computer

The Type and Talk Speech Computer was built by Namal Peripherals of Gwydir Street in Cambridge, and distributed by the Cambridge Microcomputer Centre of nearby-ish East Road. Th...

COSMAC VIP: $249 gets the entire family into creating video games

RCA's COSMAC VIP was a small kit-built microcomputer, based around the COSMAC - COmplementary Symmetry Monolithic Array Computer - CPU and which was aimed at the video market crea...

BCL's 3000 Series: First choice in the Top Ten

The original BCL - Business Computers Limited - was formed in 1968 as a result of the merger of Systemation Ltd and Business Mechanisation Ltd. This company actually went bust i...