A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

Atari 520 ST: It's not all fun and games

Here's another advert for Atari's 520 ST - for Sixteen/Thirtytwo - the Motorola 68000-based machine with 512K RAM and which became popular amongst musicians, thanks to its built-i...

Sig/Net 3: All the advantages of other dual 8 and 16 bit micros plus that vital bit more

Here's an advert for the third iteration of Chris Shelton's Sig/Net - the modular multi-user system which was launched in 1981. It also implies that dual-processor multi-user mic...

Vector 3: Computers for the advancement of society

There weren't many micro companies of the era that claimed that their products were for the advancement of society, but here is such a mission statement from Vector Graphic in thi...

Apple III: Now that you've seen their first generation, take a look at our third

It's a bit spurious to assume that the third generation of anything is necessarily better than the first of something else, especially if your third version is essentially the sam...

The IBM Personal Computer: A tool for modern times

This is an advert for the original 5150 IBM PC, possibly the model which more than any other defined personal computers for a generation or two. Even the term "personal computer...

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...

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 ...

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: 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...

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: 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, ...

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 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 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...