A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

Unicorn - Five new channels for the BBC. Here's the full programme.

A few months before the launch of Torch's Graduate - an attempt at a complete IBM PC "plug-in module" for the BBC - comes the Unicorn. This was a range of what were effectively ...

GENIE - able

A simple advert from Lowe Computers (formerly Lowe Electronics) - the sole UK importers of the Genie series of computers, built by enigmatic Hong Kong company EACA - which nicely ...

Galaxy 2 Computer System - Whatever requirements you have

This advert for the British-made Galaxy 2, from Gemini Microcomputers of Amersham, Buckinghamshire, seemed to have been around for ever - in fact the spec of twin Z80A processors ...

Free software, only £225

Looking much like its contemporary - the Prestel adapter - and with the same BBC Micro case-matching shape, Acorn's new Teletext adapter was perhaps better value as at least the c...

All microcomputers are made for tomorrow. But what about the day after?

Here's another also-ran in the micro stakes from yet another typewriter company - Olympia International. The curiously-named "People" was an 8086-based machine that ran either C...

The battle is over: MS-DOS has become the dominant 16-bit operating system

There's nothing like a bit of gloating, and this advert certainly has it in spades, featuring as it does a set of quotes about how Microsoft's MS-DOS had killed off CP/M to become...

Haywood: When the British make something, it's really something

It's tempting with 20/20 hindsight to giggle about bespoke single-task machines like the oddly-named Haywood 9000 Composite in the light of the all-purpose IBM Micro, which dawned...

ICL: We should be talking to each other

ICL had been formed as a 10%-nationalised company in 1968 by the Harold Wilson Government. It brought together a disparate range of computer companies, including English Electri...

Hyperion - The world's most powerful portable computer

Sadly, this particular Gulfstream was nothing to do with the rarified world of luxury executive jets but was rather more prosaically a subsidiary of Canadian company Bytec. The ...

Sage Computer Technology: The wise man's choice

The Sage family of micros - looking as they do like 5.25" floppy disk units in this advert, which is another accessiblity fail with its low-contrast black-text-on-dark-brown colou...

Cifer: When a microprocessor costs £3, why make do with one?

The Series 1, from Wiltshire-based Cifer - a company which had been "at the forefront of computer technology for over ten years" and which had a "bread and butter business in term...

The Tiger from HH

Whilst there had already been a few computers produced by regular electronics companies, such as Heathkit with its H9, there's probably no other example of a company that was famo...

Kenneth Kendall: Now in chip form

This advert is for a speech synthesis chip for the BBC Micro which used the voice of one of the greats of 1970s television news broadcasting - Kenneth Kendall. It's a nice bit o...

Discover the remarkable NCR Decision Mate V

Hot on the heels (well, not really) of 1962's NCR 390, comes National Cash Register's Decision Mate V. It was a dual-processor machine, with an 8-bit Zilog Z80 and a 16-bit Inte...

Lisa is much more than a computer

Featured in this back-of-the magazine third-party advert, the ill-fated Lisa was the first mass-market computer to offer the full "WIMP" - Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer - experie...