A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

At long last, the end of the queue is in sight

This advert, very reminiscent of the famous Saatchi and Saatchi "Labout isn't working" campaign of 1978 and '79, is for Gemini's MultiNet low-cost multi-user networking system. M...

Tandy Model 4P - Power and portability at a truly unbeatable price!

It wasn't until 1986 that Tandy/Radio Shack officially dropped both the Radio Shack part of the company name, as well as the TRS designation that had been part of its naming schem...

My job takes me away from my PC - but nothing takes me away from my Hewlett-Packard Portable

Staking a claim to the entire industry of laptop (or lap-held) computers with a highly generic name of The Portable, HP's laptop was from the era of portable computers with chunky...

The New Standard for Personal Scientific and Technical Visualisation Workstations

U-Microcomputers of Warrington in Cheshire, UK, had established itself as a supplier of Motorola 68000-based single- and multi-user systems aimed at the software developer market....

U-MAN: The next step

With customers as diverse as British Telecom, Oxford and Cambridge universities, the British Cast Iron Research Association and London Weekend Television, U-Microcomputers Limited...

Since Tava got that 20MB Winchester, they're inseparable

The Flyer appears to have been manufactured by Tava USA Incorporated, a company which was previously known as Replitech and which had bought out the original Tava Corporation only...

A chip off the old block

Torch's Graduate was an unusual hybrid, being part sort-of IBM PC, with an Intel 8088 CPU and a pair of 720K 5¼" floppy disk drives, but no input or display of its own, as this wa...

Memotech Personal Computer

Thanks to the lead-time involved in placing adverts in a monthly magazine, which seemed to be around six to eight weeks, Memotech had already gone bust, or was on the cusp of it, ...

Frank Slater knew all about cleaning, but it took IBM to help him tidy up his accounts

Here's another advert for IBM's PS/2, or rather it isn't as such as whilst it features a PS/2 in the office photo, it is - in common with a lot of IBM's adverts - more about the c...

Don't worry. He's on your side

Sharp's MZ-700 was essentially a colour version of the venerable MZ-80K, which had been around since 1979. It was also the first Sharp micro to be launched without a built-in moni...

The Soroc IQ120

Soroc was founded in Anaheim, California, in 1975 by five ex-employees of Lear Siegler Incorporated (LSI), another terminal manufacturer. Various sources suggest that the company...

Key into Maxi-power @ Micro-price

ECD was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November 1974. Its first products were a capacitance meter and an industrial digital thermometer, both of which sold well. At the ...

Discover the secrets of the RAIR Black Box

It's an enigmatic advert from an enigmatic company - RAIR - for its original Black Box microcomputer. It looks to be in almost Cadbury branding, and in keeping with the chocolat...

When you get right down to it, nobody does it better

Carly Simon might disagree that "nobody does it better", but here's a nice advert from Vector Graphic for a whole range of its S-100 boards. The boards include a Z80 board for $2...

Asda price - for every Tom, Dick and Einstein

Asda - the UK supermarket chain founded in 1965 whose name is a contraction of ASquith and DAiries - is clearly not a microcomputer company, or even any sort of computer company w...