A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

Gemini: Pick a disk... any disk

Gemini had been founded by John Marshall shortly after the receivers had been sent in to his former company Nascom - builder of what was once Britain's most popular kit computer, the Nascom 1. Nascom...

The Tandata P.A. - Data/voice communicating workstation

Tandata originally formed out of Tangerine, which produced a single-board computer called the Microtan 65. By 1984 it had become Tandata Holdings PLC, with Tandata Marketing Limited as one of its divisions....

Casio PB-100: The best way to put 1,568 steps in your pocket

Casio's PB-100 was one of several small "pocket computers" released around the same time that look more like calculators, however it was programmable as it had a resident version of BASIC capable of storing...

From Clive Sinclair: The No-Compromise Z88 Computer

After the financial turmoil bought on by the QL fiasco - late delivery, dodgy early firmware, and the curse of the Microdrive - together with other disasters like the Pocket TV and the C5, developed by...

RM Nimbus: Success breeds success

After selling what seems like the same machine since forever, or at least 1977 - the Research Machines 380Z - RM has finally stepped into the world of the IBM PC. Except that it's not quite - it ran...

Introducing the new PC Quattro from ICL

The multi-user ICL Quattro - so-called because it could support up to four users - was a development of the RAIR Black Box - the machine which ICL had already used as its first "ICL PC". It seems to show...

Not another new company with a personal computer

Branding itself as a "new" company, ITT had actually been around for a while. It was already famous for its ITT 2020 microcomputer of 1979 - the first official clone of the Apple II for the European market....

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 VPC 15....

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...