A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

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...

It SHOULD be a Heathkit Computer System

This is another advert from The Heath Company of Benton Harbor, Michigan - and which traded as Heathkit - for a variety of its micros and peripherals of the day. It's also nice for a change that the...

Columbia PC: Anything IBM can do...

This is an advert for a hugely-significant machine in the history of the microcomputer - in particular that of the modern PC, in the IBM sense. It's for Columbia Data Products' PC - the first legal IBM...

Dynabyte computers are all business inside and out

This is a nice advert for Dynabyte showing various models in its DB series of microcomputers. The middle box is the company's DB 8/1 microcomputer - a 4MHz Z80 CPU with one parallel and two serial ports,...

Shelton Sig/Net: 211 Power!

With a design that would not have looked out of place on Gerry Anderson's "Space: 1999", the Shelton sig/net 211 - designed by Chris Shelton, who had once worked for Nascom - was one of a range of modular...

Ohio C2-8P: An exceptional value in personal computing

Released at about the same time as the company's much larger (and more expensive) Challenger III range, the II was aimed more at the small-business and personal end of the market - as seen by the cassette...

Microcomputer programming is a snap with the Iasis Computer in a Book

This is a real wild-card entry from Iasis Inc. of Sunnyvale in California - an actual functional computer in a book, with surrounding 250-page instructional material in the form of a programming course....

32K. One card. One low price. Only from The Digital Group

The Digital Group was entirely unrelated to the other Digital - Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC - and was founded in Denver, Colorado, in 1974. It went bust only five years later, thanks to supply...

HP85: It works like a big computer, only it's yours

HP's 85, launched this year, was billed as a "scientific desktop" computer. It was built around the company's own proprietary CPU, running at a surprisingly-slow 0.625MHz. However, it apparently made...

The Poly 88 Microcomputer System - from PolyMorphic

PolyMorphic had started out making expansion cards for the Altair 8800 - the micro launched in January 1975 that as well being the first affordable microcomputer in the modern sense also gave the world...

Silicon Office: Now you can do all the filing with one finger

This is a slightly disturbing advert produced by Commodore in partnership with (or sponsorship of) Bristol Software Factory, for the latter's Silicon Office product. It's along the lines of the "buy...

Micronet 800: Tunes your BBC into a new channel of news, views, facts and fun

Micronet was a popular subsection of the dial-up information system Prestel. Prestel - which shared a technological specification with television Viewdata systems like Ceefax and Oracle - had been launched...

Sinclair ZX Spectrum: Colour and sound... High-Resolution graphics... from only £125!

This advert shows the Mark 1 Spectrum - as shown by the light grey keys - which retailed for £125 (or around [[125|1983]] in [[now]] terms), and in a bit of a Sinclair theme, promised "coming soon" stuff...