A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

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...

You'll never forget your first TMK 300 micro

Unlike the rest of the world then, as this advert appears to be a one-off - and even then it appeared in specialist systems magazine Systems International, rather than a mainstrea...

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 £8,8...

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 ...

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...

Make friends with Panther... The British micro system

Here's another advert for another fairly generic Z80-based (or possibly Intel 8080) CP/M micro system, from Cyber Electronics Ltd. of Ilford in Essex. Unlike most similar adverts...

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

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 Instrument...

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...

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...

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...

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)...