1985 adverts

Micronet 800: Nice password, shame about the identity

With an advert containing a theme still relevant to a modern audience - "your special identity number and personal password the valuable key to a huge database" - Micronet 800 wa...

All you need to do this, is this: The Commodore 128 and 64

Officially launched at the 1985 January Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and built with the same case used for the late-model C64s, the Commodore 128 was the company's last ...

Miracle Technology WS2000 Modem: Ace Down The Line

The last time a modem was advertised as a thing in its own right was probably towards the end of the 1990s, when the pinacle of dial-up - the 56K modem - came out. Before then, ...

It does accounts, projections, wordprocessing and 180mph

Only months after Amstrad had released the CPC 664, it was back with an entry in the battle-du-jour which by late summer of 1985 was all about 128K micros. Whilst not really off...

Get even more attached to your Amstrad

Many computer companies of the time seemed to be happy to rely on third parties to produce peripherals for their machines, particularly Acorn which was famous for its long timesca...

The greatest breakthrough in wrist technology since Seiko introduced quartz

Not actually an advert for a computer, per se, but an interesting reflection of what was all the rage at the time: multi-function "James Bond"-style watches. The Seiko RC1000 is...

Victor: The power to control won't cost you the Earth

From a somewhat baffling advert featuring a raging dude who looks like a cross between Bill Bixby as David Banner and Lou Ferigno as the Hulk in the 80s TV series The Incredible H...

Introducing the new and improved IBM PC. From £49.50

Much has been written about how CP/M, the pioneering, multi-platform operating system written by Gary Kildall and his company Digital Research - originally known as Intergalactic ...

More than a Word Processor for less than a typewriter

Retailing for only £399 - about £1,600 in 2025 and about a quarter the price of an IBM PC at the time, the P‍CW 8256 and its follow ups were highly significant and transformative ...

RM Nimbus: Success breeds success

After selling what seems like the same machine since forever, or at least 1977 - the Research Machines 380Z - RM has finally stepped into the world of the IBM PC. Except that it'...

£79.99 all in: the Commodore Communications Modem

Way before the masses discovered the joys of the Internet (as in after 1995), there existed a vibrant dial-up community using Bulletin Boards and infotext/Viewdata services like P...

At last, the business PC you can welcome like an old friend

Not to be left out in the stampede for IBM PCs and their compatible ilk (it's four years since the IBM PC launched), comes this offering from Commodore for its version. This par...

The Commodore 128. When you look at the facts, they do seem to weigh rather heavily in our favour.

The 128 was Commodore's last 8-bit computer and was released in 1985, although news of the 128 started appearing at the end of 1984, with Popular Computing Weekly saying that "Com...

Buy one of these Commodore peripherals for £199.99 and get a Seiko RC-1000 free!

It's another advert depicting the mid-1980s rage-du-jour of the "wrist terminal", in the form of the Seiko RC-1000 (also seen here). Smart watches or wearables seem to pop up ev...

Trying to play all the games you can get for the Sinclair Spectrum could kill you (about 5,000 times)

Perhaps the first time that "software sold a machine" was when the release of Visicalc saved the Apple II in 1979, but certainly by the mid 1980s the availability of software had ...

BBC External Services

This advert seems to represent the end of a period of retrenchment for Acorn following a difficult year which had seen it bailed out by Italian company Olivetti back in February. ...

Introducing the new PC Quattro from ICL

The multi-user ICL Quattro - so-called because it could support up to four users - was a development of the RAIR Black Box - the machine which ICL had already used as its first "I...

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, ...