A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

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...

At £299 it's very little. At 64K it's very large

The Commodore 64 - sometimes known as the SuperVic - was the company's replacement for its VIC-20 machine, the limited but popular home micro which was the first computer to sell more than one million...

If you want flexibility and expandability, then you want the Microtan 65

The Microtan 65 was a single-board computer first built by Tangerine in 1980. Available as either a kit, or ready assembled, Tangerine sold around 10,000 of the 6502-based boards before abandoning it....

CP/M low-cost microcomputer software

Called at the time a "control program for microcomputers", hence the initials, CP/M had become the de-facto operating system for many microcomputers of the mid 1970s, following its launch in 1973. It...

TLF Mini 12: Why buy a micro when you can buy a mini for less!

One of the most popular range of minicomputers in the 1960s and '70s was DEC's PDP - Programmed Data Processor - series of sometimes room-sized machines (once disk units and printers had been added)....

Cromemco Z-2: Meet the most powerful μC system available for dedicated work

Just a few months after Cromemco's Z-1 Z80-based micro was launched comes an update in the shape of the Z-2. Only there doesn't seem to be that much updated - it still runs the same 4MHz Z80 microprocessor,...