A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

The new Data General/One. The only industry-standard PC you can use on a camel

Here's another one of those adverts where it's tempting to question whether the claims made had ever actually been tested in the real world. It's for Data General's One - the 4.5kg portable launched...

The new Sharp MZ5600. It makes the competition look positively untogether.

Launched nearly two years before in September 1983, Sharp's MZ5600 - the name trying to hold on to a lineage going back to the MZ-80 - was an MS-DOS-compatible IBM sort-of-clone, but running a true 16-bit...

Prestel - the biggest breakthrough in communication since the telephone and television

By late 1981, Tangerine - a company founded in 1978 as a video display card manufacturer but which by now was more famous for its Microtan 65 computer - had released the Tantel Prestel adapter, via its...

Step by step with the computer system designed for tomorrow

Tangerine Computer Systems had been founded in 1979 in St. Ives, Cambridgeshire - once the home of Clive Sinclair's Radionics company. Its first product had been the well-received Tan 1638 video-adapter...

Choose Atom Power

Right on the cusp of Acorn's launch of the Proton - the computer better known as the BBC Micro - comes this advert for its existing Atom, the 1980 machine which evolved from the even-earlier System 1,...

Tandon introduces the computer that doesn't add up

It's 1990 and laptops still haven't quite reached the proportions of what would be considered a "modern" laptop, however the price - according to Tandon at least - does seem to have reached the point...

The Attaché Business System - The only system designed and supported exclusively for business applications

Launched in the UK in May 1979, the Attaché was said by PRAC in its May 1979 issue to be "in a sense, Pertec's first microcomputer", in that unlike the company's previous offerings, which were based upon...

If you can buy more on one board for under £300 - buy us one too!

This is the advert which launched the Nascom 2 - an update of the popular Chris Shelton-designed Nascom 1, which was first launched in 1977. The Nascom 2 came with the faster 4MHz Zilog Z80A, an improved...

New from Texas Instruments. The world's most powerful pocket calculators. For the easiest problem solving ever.

From the company which "made micro-electronic calculators and watches possible" - Texas Instruments - comes a contender for Commodore's "button monster" crown, albeit with a mere 45 buttons compared to...

Butel-Athena: The ideal Small Business System

From another company that appears to have left almost no trace whatsoever - Butel-Comco Limited of Southampton - comes this advert for the Athena, one of a handful of microcomputers that came with a built-in...

Micronetworks introduce PM1000

Here's a seemingly one-off advert for what also seems to be a one-off machine: the PM1000 from Micro Networks, of Pall Mall in London. It's unusual because it's one of only a handful of micros which...

Kontron: Look to tomorrow with the PSIΨ80 Microcomputer Series

It's another advert aimed at OEMs rather than the end user, this time from Kontron Mikrocomputer GmbH of Echning, near Munich in what was West Germany. Demonstrating its target market of engineering,...

4MHz Z80A, 64K RAM, twin 200K disks for £1299

Here is probably the first advert of Chris Shelton's Sig/Net, launched around July or August this year. Shelton, who had once worked for Nascom, had started Shelton Instruments back in 1970, and became...

The if800 - Colour in your computing

The awkwardly-named if800 from OKI - first launched in 1980 - was on the face of it yet another conventional Z80A-based micro, however it differed from many by coming with an integrated printer - thanks...

Dealers, we'll help you out of the microcomputer jungle

In the days before visual accessibility guidelines existed, and aimed more at potential dealers than the general public, this advert for Altos is actually placed by Microtex of Windsor, which was importing...