A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

Introducing Sol Systems - A complete computer/terminal concept

This advert - which was part of an impressive six-page spread - shows the Sol-20, a machine which first shipped only a month before in December 1976, as well as the impressive ran...

Programming the 68000 by Metacomco

St Pauls, Bristol-based Metacomco had been quietly writing system software and compilers for the Motorola 68000 processor, and had also previously licenced its own 8086 BASIC inte...

Commodore Amiga - astounding by any stretch of the imagination

The Amiga, code-named "Lorraine", was first demonstrated to a select few at June 1984's CES show in Chicago, by Amiga, a company founded by Jay Miner, one of the original designer...

Decision 1 - the only machine that runs almost everything

George Morrow - the founder of Morrow Designs - was born in 1934 and earned a degree in physics from Stanford before going on to do a master's in mathematics at the University of ...

You'd better believe this... or you won't believe our prices

Michael Dell started out at the age of 13 selling mail-order stamps, and by the time he was at High School he was earning some $17,000 a year selling newspaper subscriptions with ...

The best software on earth comes from Psion

Psion had been founded in 1980 by David Potter, who had been born in South Africa but who had moved to the UK to study science at Cambridge University. He went on to get a doctora...

One way or another, you can have a computer in your pocket

Launched in 1984, the Psion Organiser, billed by Psion as the "world's first practical pocket computer" is considered - at least by its second incarnation, the Organiser II - as t...

More than a Word Processor for less than a typewriter

Retailing for only £399 - about £1,600 in 2025 and about a quarter the price of an IBM PC at the time, the P‍CW 8256 and its follow ups were highly significant and transformative ...

This year will be as important to the computer industry as 1959 was to the motor industry

It's perhaps stretching it a bit to assert that the launch of another IBM clone, albeit one of the first "legitimate" clones, was as significant as the 1959 launch of Alec Issigon...

Make it portable! Make it possible

Bondwell was the trading name of Bondwell Holdings Limited of Hong Kong and was the company that had rescued the failed SpectraVideo. SpectraVideo - as SpectraVision - had made i...

New from Casio - mighty micros that fit in your briefcase

1983 and 1984 were definitely the years of the "lap-held" computer, as Personal Computer World liked to call it. Pioneered in 1983 by machines like Epson's HX-20, they weren't t...

Grafpad - for as many uses as YOU can imagine!

British Micro was a company started by Manas Heghoyan, formerly of Hegotron Printed Circuit Boards Ltd and who had once tried to buy John Marshall's after it had gone bust in 198...

Who says you can't get fired for buying IBM?

Wang, founded in 1951 by Dr. An Wang and Dr. G.Y. Chu, was a US computer company based in Massachussetts, US, which, at its peak in the 1980s generated revenues of $3 billion bef...

The DASH-80, designed and assembled in Great Britain

It's a mystery entry, courtesy of Aculab, for the DASH-80 - a Z80B-based machine operating at 6MHz (not 6 milli-Hertz as the advert would have it) with 128K RAM. It ran CP/M and...

Think ahead! ITT 3030 Programmed for Growth

When Apple had been a "new struggling company with few resources and was a big consumer group with manufacturing and marketing ability in Europe", ITT had secured the gig to manu...