A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

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 aid of an Apple II....

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 doctorate at Imperial College,...

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 the world's first usable...

More than a Word Processor for less than a typewriter

Retailing for only £399 - about [[399|1985]] in [[now]] 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 in the UK market,...

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 Issigonis's iconic car, but...

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 its name as a producer...

New from Casio - mighty micros that fit in your briefcase

1983 and 1984 were definitely the years of the "lap-held" computer, as PCW liked to call it. Pioneered in 1983 by machines like Epson's HX-20, they weren't true laptops as they lacked a proper screen,...

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 in 1980. Although that...

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 before fizzling out, via...

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 came with with Wordstar,...

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 manufacture the Apple...

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 rather quiet about the...

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 business computer, and most...

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 of its manufacture of...

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 "largest range in London",...