A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

For those that do, those that don't and those that might

The Japanese Sord M5, launched in October 1982 at the Tokyo Data Show, was one of a handful of computers - a group which included the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Jupiter Ace - that decided not to provide...

SWTPC: System B $4,495.00

It's another entry in that curious sideline of the early microcomputer industry: computers as furniture. On offer is Southwest Technical Products' System B - a CT-64 terminal, dual 1.2MB 8" floppy disk...

New Amiga 500 - Now other home computers are just toys

The original Amiga, or A1000 as it came to be known, nearly didn't make it when it launched in 1986, as Commodore was going through some major financial problems whilst its potential saviour machine was...

Call Microcentre for Cromemco

It's three years into the era of the all-conquering IBM PC, and Cromemco - a company founded back in 1974 - is still hanging on. What's more, it's still producing broadly-similar systems from the 1970s,...

Will you be the first Earthling to win a place among the Elite?

Elite was perhaps Acornsoft's most famous game. It was written by Ian Bell and David Braben, was hugely influential and, according to Sophie Wilson, one of the designers of the BBC Micro, was "the game...

Make the BBC an expert at communications

Prism was an interesting company that, although not hugely famous by itself, had a hand in all sorts of areas of the UK microcomputer industry. It started out life as the sole distributor for Sinclair's...

For the office. Or the home office.

It's a nicely-illustrated advert showing some dude as half in an office and half working at home - split down the middle whilst one-finger-typing on a Commodore 64. Commodore is clearly trying to position...

How much available memory you get with the new Oric Atmos

A simple, if striking, advert for Oric's "new" Atmos - in reality the original Oric-1 in a new case and with a load of bug fixes. The advert points out that many home micros of the day used areas of...

The New Electron from Acorn. Ask any child at school why it's worth £199

The Electron was first announced in 1982, launched in 1983, but was beset with production delays which meant it didn't really start shipping until early 1984. That could explain why this advert from...

The Link from Panasonic. The portable computer that lets you take the advantages of an office computer anywhere you go.

It's an advert from Matshushita Electric Industrial Co., trading as Panasonic, for its awkward-to-search-for "The Link" portable computer. Pitched less as a full-on microcomputer than perhaps Sharp's...

Sharp: The Amazing Pocket Computer in Living Color

Sharp's PC-1500 was - like Epson's HX-20 and Tandy/Radio Shack's Micro-Executive Workstation - one of several LCD-based hand-held computers around at the time, although Sharp's model looks a little more...

Simplify your bookkeeping with this $3432 Radio Shack TRS-80 Computer System

Here's another advert from Tandy/Radio Shack for the Model III variant of its TRS-80, or Trash-80 - the original version of which had been launched back in 1977. It was not uncommon for companies to...

Omninet: The Corvus Connection

Corvus was founded in 1979 with a few million dollars of venture-capital seed money in order to build disk drives for Apple. However, as disk drives were often more expensive than the computers they...

Three out of every four computers going into schools are BBC Micros

Acorn churned out a lot of adverts around this time which were broadly similar: a BBC Micro doing something, with reams of text explaining it. This one - whilst even more wordy than usual - is interesting...

Research Machines: Graphics machine

There weren't many constants during the microcomputer explosion, but if there was one it was possibly this: Research Machines' 380Z. First launched in 1977, it was still going here in 1983, and would...