A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

Our Rivals are Speechless: The Apricot Portable

Here's an advert for the Apricot Portable - the first portable computer anywhere to offer a speech recognition system, with a four-thousand word vocabulary and the ability underst...

Toshiba MSX

Although Toshiba had dabbled in the computer market a couple of years before, with its T-200, and whilst the US and the UK markets were busy churning out as may systems as possibl...

Altair 8800: World's Most Inexpensive BASIC Language System

If there's one microcomputer that can claim to be the grandaddy of the entire industry then it's this - the Altair 8800, from Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, better k...

Tandon: The Magnifient Seven

This advert more than many sums up the state of the microcomputer industry in the latter half of the 1980s. Instead of an actual variety of computers, like Commodore might have h...

Atari 400 and 800: More K's, Less £'s

Excepting an egregious use of "less" instead of "fewer", this advert nicely shows Atari's 400 and 800 machines, which had been launched in 1978 but didn't make it to the UK until ...

Alphatext: the WP system that stands alone

Here's an advert for another dedicated word-processing system, in an era where it seems that the idea that general-purpose computers could do word processing as well as other thin...

Tomorrow's computer here today: The Bytemaster

The Bytemaster - or perhaps more correctly the Mini Bytemaster - was the last computer to be designed by the Digital Group, of Denver, Colorado, before the company's collapse in 1...

Equinox: All Together Now!

The Equinox 100 was a Zilog Z80 or Intel 8080-based system with an industry-standard S-100 bus - the most popular bus standard of the day. It was built by Parasitic Engineering ...

Tandy TRS-80 Word Processing System

There was a phase for a few years where the idea of microcomputers being general-purpose machines still hadn't caught in with some sectors of the market, and so these general-purp...

North Star: Four star performers for the S-100 bus

A simple advert for North Star's range of S-100 boards - designed for its own Horizon micro, but compatible with any other S-100 micro running Intel's 8080 or the Zilog Z80 proces...

Get it out of your system: MicroDaSys makes it easy

On the face of it, this is yet another Motorola 6800-based system with an S-100 bus, however it's perhaps the micro which more than any other most closely resembles an actual type...

It SHOULD be a Heathkit Computer System

This is another advert from The Heath Company of Benton Harbour, Michigan - and which traded as Heathkit - for a variety of its micros and peripherals of the day. It's nice for a ...

Columbia PC: Anything IBM can do...

This is an advert for a hugely-significant machine in the history of the microcomputer - in particular that of the modern PC, in the IBM sense. It's for Columbia Data Products' P...

Dynabyte computers are all business inside and out

This is a nice advert for Dynabyte showing various models in its DB series of microcomputers. The middle box is the company's DB 8/1 microcomputer - a 4MHz Z80 CPU with one paral...

Shelton Sig/Net: 211 Power!

With a design that would not have looked out of place on Gerry Anderson's "Space: 1999", the Shelton sig/net 211 - designed by Chris Shelton, who had once worked for Nascom - was...