A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

SuperStar Multi-User System is Just Right

Bromcom - initially known as Bromley Computer Consultancy Ltd - launched its SuperStar multi-user system at the beginning of 1984. Running a 16-bit host processor with the compan...

Compact System for Professionals

Once mentioned in Parliament as one of only two British computer manufacturers on the government's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency list of approved suppliers to hav...

The affordable power source in your PC to run today's games.

Intel didn't do a huge amount of advertising, seeming to prefer to allow word-of-mouth, or inertia, to do its selling. In the early 1970s, it had the hobbyist and microcomputer m...

Britain can still find an extra byte

Here's an advert from the curiously-named Computer Ancilliaries Limited, for what at first appear to be two of its machines - the British-built Caltext Word Processor and the Calt...

CAL Personal Computer: Bet you wish you were called IBM

It's sometimes mistakenly given that the name of the intelligent computer in 2001 - HAL - is a dig at IBM, as it's every letter of that company's acronym shifted down one in the a...

Durango: See our intelligent little space conqueror and you'll know why he's green

This advert, which features a green Mekon - the alien character from British 1950s comic Dan Dare - is for one of the least computer-ey micros in the entire collection: the Durang...

Compuserve

It's been ten years since Compuserve launched the world's first online real-time chat service, the CB Simulator, and a couple of years since the "invention" of Internet Relay Cha...

Thanks to CompuServe's CB Simulator, 'Digital Fox' Accessed 'Data Hari' and Proceeded to an 'Altared' State

Probably like the 1960's generation liked to think it invented sex, today's "yoof" probably like to assume that they invented "on-line", however it was not so, as shown by this ad...

Micro-Professor: The 64K Computer That Spans Generations

First launched in 1982, the Micro-Professor MPF II was Multitech Corporation's update to its earlier MPF1 machine, although this time it was aimed more at the home and Apple II ma...

The new MPF1 Plus - The lowest-cost Z80 computer with all these features!

The Microprofessor MPF-1 Plus was a redesigned version of the original MPF-1, originally released by Multitech Industrial Corporation in the summer of 1982. Its launch came after ...

Computerise without compromise: Quantum QM 2000

This is short-lived advert from Leed's-based Quantum Computer Systems Limited, for its new all-British Quantum 2000 microcomputer, where the definition of "all British" is somewha...

Join the jet set

Acorn wasn't particularly well know for its own-branded peripherals, so this advert is fairly unusual not only for that, but also because the printing technology in use - spark-er...

New: The IT Andromeda Zita-E

This is another mystery entry, in this case for the Andromeda Zita-E - for Executive - from ITCS, or IT Computer Services Limited of Ashford, near Staines, in Middlesex. The And...

Now the integral system with performance, quality, expandability and reliability

The ABC24 and ABC26 were Z80 micros which differed only in the size of floppy disk drive they offered - either 620K on dual 5¼" drives, or an impressive 2.3MB on dual 8" drives. ...

The new 1Mb 1040STF: With a memory like that you can be sure we haven't forgotten a thing

By the middle of 1986, the IBM PC was well-established as the "standard" computer architecture, but there was a handful of alternatives, including Commodore's Amiga, Apple's Macin...