A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

The new TI Professional Computer. If you want the business edge, it's the answer

Just a few months before Texas Instruments announced that due to poor sales of its TI99/4A home micro it was exiting the consumer and home-computer business, comes this advert for its TI Professional....

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 Hulk, comes the Victor...

Type and Talk Speech Computer

The Type and Talk Speech Computer was built by Namal Peripherals of Gwydir Street in Cambridge, and distributed by the Cambridge Microcomputer Centre of nearby-ish East Road. The advert however claims...

COSMAC VIP: $249 gets the entire family into creating video games

RCA's COSMAC VIP was a small kit-built microcomputer, based around the COSMAC - COmplementary Symmetry Monolithic Array Computer - CPU and which was aimed at the video market created by games like Atari's...

BCL's 3000 Series: First choice in the Top Ten

The original BCL - Business Computers Limited - was formed in 1968 as a result of the merger of Systemation Ltd and Business Mechanisation Ltd. This company actually went bust in 1974 but was ressurected...

Pluto: run rings around the competition!

The Pluto graphics card from IO Research, first launched in 1982, could perhaps lay claim to being one of the first "high end" graphics cards aimed at consumers. Re-sold by Nascom as its "Colour Graphics...

If you want to know which computer to buy, ask your expert.

This is another of those adverts popular at the time which like to suggest that anyone over 20 couldn't possibly know how to use a computer. It was largely true. Before the home micro explosion, computers...

One Sol-20 equals three computers.

Here's another advert for Processor Technology's Sol-20 - the microcomputer designed by Lee Felsenstein in 1976. It's offering the Sol-20 in three bundles - the Sol System I, II and III. The cheapest...

The Commodore 64 is compact and nippy. But its memory... well that's a little different.

Commodore was clearly milking the "elephants have a long memory" thing as this advert for the Commodore 64, first launched at the Hanover Computer Fair in April 1982, shows. It was one of several adverts...

Never in the history of business systems has so little done so much

Both the "budget" Amiga 500 and higher-end A2000 were announced at the same time during the winter CES show in Las Vegas in 1987. However, Commodore actually managed to start shipping the A2000 several...

It's only £695. And that's the last reason you should buy it.

The Commodore 500, sometimes known as the P Series, was part of the CBM-II Series - an attempt to produce an update for the original Commodore PET and seen as the company's last chance to break the business...

It's not all Greek to Context

The Context was built by C/WP (Computers/Word Processors) of the UK from a design bought from Ontel in the US, where it was known as the Amigo. It was a dual-CPU machine, with a Zilog Z80A plus 64K RAM...

Newbury. Growing Mighty with the Micros

Newbury Laboratories will forever be associated with the NewBrain - the small, portable micro that was temporarily the choice to be the BBC Microcomputer. However, development was slow, production was...

Turn your Apple into the world's most versatile personal computer.

This is a real curiosity from Microsoft which shows how different the company was before the power of its coming hegemony with Intel and its own MS-DOS - and later Windows operating system - corrupted...

A Minstrel 4 eight-user package - £15,564 complete

It's often said that the rise of cheap commodity PCs and affordable networking killed off the multi-user system, but it's still here in 1987 in the form of Hotel Microsystems' Minstrel 4. Hotel Microsystems...