A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

The Aviator - One man's flight to save his home town

The image above is a scan of the pre-press version of the advert and is used with permission. © Acornsoft Ltd 1985 This particular advert - which shows a Mark VI Spitfire of the RAF's 124 Squadron -...

The new IBM Personal System/2. Marry into the future without divorcing the past.

By 1986 IBM was suffering, partly from the rise of the clones of its original IBM 5150 (the "PC"), but also because it had slowed down product releases in the PC market it had created in favour of development...

What will you do with 12-year-old programmers when he reaches 16?

This is an interesting advert - gender stereotyping aside - in the form of its implied message, from a company that controlled much of the UK Schools' IT hardware market until it finally bailed out of...

Der Schnellste PC der Welt - Tut's Auch

This advert from German magazine Der Spiegel - which roughly translates as "The fastest PC in the world - that'll do" - continues a frequently-visited meme of microcomputer advertising - that of wheeling...

BBC External Services

This advert seems to represent the end of a period of retrenchment for Acorn following a difficult year which had seen it bailed out by Italian company Olivetti back in February. For most of the year...

The Archimedes A3000

The A3000 was an update of the original Archimedes - also known in at least some parts of the press as the ARM, or more simply the Arc or Archie - which had been launched in 1987 and which first started...

Introducing Macintosh. What makes it tick. And talk.

Famously introduced by an Orwellian Ridley Scott-directed advert at the 1984 Super Bowl - shown only once - and billed by Steve Jobs as "the fastest and most powerful computer ever placed in the hands...

Here's an up-front saving on the Tandy 16K Color Computer 2

Here's a festively-themed advert for the second version of Tandy's Color Computer 2, or "CoCo". With £20 off coz it's Christmas, the CoCo was available for only £99.95 - only [[100|1984]] in [[now]]...

Introducing the new and improved IBM PC. From £49.50

Much has been written about how CP/M, the pioneering, multi-platform operating system written by Gary Kildall and his company Digital Research - originally known as Intergalactic Digital Research and...

The BBC Master Compact: Think of it as a down payment on your child's future uniform

The BBC Master Compact was an entry in the BBC Master series, which in turn was produced as the follow-up to the BBC Model B microcomputer, first launched at the end of 1981. It was designed jointly...

Micronet 800: Nice password, shame about the identity

With an advert containing a theme still relevant to a modern audience - "your special identity number and personal password [are] the valuable key to a huge database" - Micronet 800 was a subsection of...

Trad? Not the Elliott 503!

The Elliott 503 was built by British computer company Elliott Brothers, a subsidiary of the Elliott Automation Group, as a much faster but software-compatible evolution of the 803 mentioned in the advert....

A beginner's guide to the best in business computers

ACT had carved out a briefly-successful niche in the UK with its Apricot range of micros, several of which touted their "Sirius" compatibility, rather than the usual IBM. However, when the company launched...

With PCjr, you can add options that haven't even been invented yet

The PCjr, also know by its development code-name of "Peanut" - and variously as Hercules, Sprite, Pigeon and Pancake - was IBM's attempt to crack the home market, which at the time was mostly owned by...

Be who you want to be: The new Sinclair has one big disk advantage

Hot on the heels of the Sinclair 128K +2 Spectrum, released in August of this year, came the +3 version, which had the same slightly-non-standard 3" floppy drive that owner Amstrad used on its other machines...