1981 adverts

Butel-Athena: The ideal Small Business System

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

Three Atari Video Computer Systems Must Be Won!

Here's a nice competition advert which featured in a March or April edition of the comic 2000AD, and which offered the chance to win one of three Atari VCS2600 (sometimes known as...

Outside of the garden you need a computer that can grow - Ithaca InterSystems DPS-1

This adverts shows one of many ageing Zilog Z80-based machines of this era running on an S-100 bus: the DPS-1, from Ithaca InterSystems, founded in Ithaca, New York, in 1977. Th...

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 $149.95 Personal Computer: Introducing the Sinclair ZX81

Before Sinclair cut a deal with US watch-manufacturer Timex to distributes the ZX81 in the US as the Timex Sinclair 1000 or 1500, it was available in its original "Sinclair ZX81" ...

The Onyx C8000 Series

Onyx was formed in December 1978 by two former Zilog employees, Robert Marsh and Kip Myers, with some additional input from fellow former Zilog employee Doug Broiles, who had left...

Some Hard Facts from Haywood

Given the side-bar looking for distributors, this would appear to be a fairly early advert from Haywood Electronic Associates, trading as Haywood. However, the company appeared to...

The Acorn Econet: the new low-cost interconnecting communication system for computers and peripherals

Here's a rare advert for Acorn's Econet - an affordable network using cheap four- or five-wire cabling (instead of the coaxial cabling found on some other networks) and which coul...

The Sinclair ZX81 Personal Computer - New High Performance, New Low Price, Same Sinclair Simplicity

Here's another advert for the Sinclair ZX81 - the computer that sold more than 1.5 million units and which almost single-handedly kick-started the computer revolution in the UK. I...

VIC-20: The Waiting is Over. The Rush has Begun

This is the advert that formally kicked off Commodore's launch campaign in the UK for the VIC-20 - the 6502-based colour computer which became the first ever to sell a million uni...

Commodore PET: Choosing a Computer Made Simple

The PET had been around for nearly five years by the time this advert was published, and so it's less of a case of advertising the hardware - which hasn't really changed much, apa...

Pear II - we proudly announce the arrival of the computer you have been waiting for

This advert is a brazen attempt to sell an Apple II clone machine, but unlike Franklin's Ace 1200, had the extra "beyond the call of duty" feature of even naming the machine and c...

Versatility is the Key - The Video Genie System

The EG 3003 Video Genie System was a sort-of TRS-80 Model 1 clone, made by enigmatic Hong Kong electronics company EACA and distributed in the UK by Lowe Electronics. Lowe, an es...

Important notice to all micro-computer purchasers: The BBC Micro-computer system

This is perhaps the advert that really started it all for Acorn, at least in terms of the Acorn Proton, a.k.a. the BBC Micro. It announced the upcoming availability of the new BB...

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 han...