A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

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 Nascom after it had gone bust ...

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

[extra: pcw-1985-11_MAXWELL.webp|Robert Maxwell, owner of Oxford United FC, with some women in United kit, © Personal Computer World, November 1985|300|left]Wang, founded in ...

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 [ITT] was a big consumer group with manufacturing and marketing ability in Europe", ITT had secured the gig to...

Have you got what it takes to take what we've got?

This advert from Canon was aimed at potential resellers rather than buyers and was for the Canon CX-1, a machine first announced in 1981. Following the announcement, Canon went ...

RAIR: The box is not always black

This advert from RAIR shows the company's credentials as an OEM supplier, with the its original "Black Box" - shown on the bottom - also showing up as the Innsite micro, Ryman bus...

BASF gives a good deal

As if to prove that absolutely everyone seemed to be having a go at the microcomputer industry, even German globo-chemico-corp BASF launched its own micro, ostensibly off the bat ...

EuroC - Simplicity is the watchword

Euro-Calc of Tottenham Court Road was a company that appeared to have started as an importer and re-seller of electronic calculators and watches, seling what it claimed was the "l...

<b>A Map of connections in the early microcomputer industry</b>

This is an attempt at a visualization of the connections in the sometimes-incestuous early microcomputer industry. It is not yet claimed to be complete, but should be seen as a wor...

How to solve Systems problems - Zilog's MCZ family

Here's a rare advert from Zilog for its MCZ range of micros - everything from an entry-level floppy-disk-based model up to the MCZ 1/35 rack-mount machine with 10MB storage. Th...