A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

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, along with a lot of text...

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 with the option of at least...

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 [[2064|1984]] in [[now]]. The M20 - first released in 1982 - was unusually...

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, the popular but ageing...

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 understand accents "from...

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 possible without regard to compatibility...

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 known as MITS. Originally...

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 have had with its VIC-20,...

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 1981 or so. The project...

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 things seems to have passed...

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 1979. It was based around...

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 of Albany, California,...

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-purpose machines would still...

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 processor. The range included...

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 typewriter. It's shown...