A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

Commodore
October 1983
The Commodore 8296 Business Computer puts power at your command
Released in 1983, the 8296 was the last of the PET line - the world's first personal computer, which had been first shown at Chicago CES in January 1977. Commodore had already tr...

Commodore
December 1984
The report you are waiting for: simple, factual, honest and 100% biased
This advert was part of a lavish four-page spread in the December 1984 edition of Personal Computer World. It's obviously Christmas as there's a Santa under the entry for "X" for ...

Acorn
January 1984
BBC Micro: Not all computers stay at home
This was one of several similar adverts for the BBC Micro which ran for a few months. They all follow a pattern of showing various things that the BBC - aka Proton - was good at, ...

Seiko
January 1984
Seiko: Where fools rush in - we made sure...
Perhaps more famous for its digital watches, Seiko had its own Business Computers line and launched this - the Series 8600 - in 1983. It ran on an 5MHz Intel 8086 CPU and came wi...

Olivetti
25th February 1984
When you add up the facts, no other micro equals ours
It's another advert for British Olivetti's M20 - in this case the entry-level dual-floppy M20 CQ, available for £2,064 - about £8,710 in 2025. The M20 - first released in 1982 - ...

Gemini Micro
December 1984
Gemini: Customised Computers, at off-the-peg prices
Gemini Microcomputers, of Amersham in Buckinghamshire, seems to have based its entire existance on more-or-less the same thing - boards built around the Z80 CPU and running CP/M, ...

ACT/Apricot
December 1984
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 to unde...

Toshiba
October 1984
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...

MITS
August 1975
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
December 1986
Tandon: The Magnificent Seven
This advert more than many sums up the dullness of the microcomputer industry in the latter half of the 1980s. Instead of an actual variety of computers, like Commodore might hav...

Atari
June 1983
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 ...

Triumph-Adler
June 1983
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...

Digital Group
April 1978
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/Parasitic
October 1977
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/Radio Shack
November 1982
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...