A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

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...

Turn your Spectrum into a Spectrum+ for just £20

1985 was the beginning of the end for Sinclair, at least as far as Uncle Clive was concerned. The company's "next generation" QL, launched in January 1984 but not actually available until April of that...

Introducing the personal computer you've been waiting for: The Exidy Sorcerer

Exidy Incorporated was the third-largest producer of video arcade games in the US when it was encouraged by Paul Terrell to enter the consumer electronics market towards the end of 1978. Paul Terrell...

Re-balance This Sheet in One Second

Like several computers of the day, Acorn's BBC Micro could take software in the form of PROM - programmable read-only memory. Some, like the VIC-20, could take it one-program-at-a-time in the form of...

Atari Star Raiders: New game, private property

This "advert", which appeared in the pre-Christmas edition of Personal Computer World and which encourages infringers to write to Graham Daubney - who would later become director of developments for Spectrum...

Atari 520STM: To help you destroy the aliens, we've massacred the price

The Atari 520STM was fundamentally the same machine as the previous ST model, except that it came with a built-in TV modulator and had its OS and GEM graphics manager supplied in ROM. The "special offer"...

Instead of computers catching up with technology, technology now has to catch up with a computer

In the summer of 1982, one-time Olympic chess player and former chess grandmaster David Levy, of Intelligent Software - a company best known for producing programs like Cyrus IS Chess, written by Richard...

Kaypro 2: The last word in portable micros

Built by Andrew Kay's Non-Linear Systems, with the motherboard designed by an out-sourced circuit-design consultant, and created as a direct competitor to the Osborne 1, the Kaypro 2 was for a while a...

Olivetti - Compatibility plus!

Along with almost every major manufacturer of the time, Olivetti was not one to refuse a spot on the bandwagon that was the IBM PC format. Here, it's offering an 8086 "true 16 bit" PC clone, although...

On average, there is one new software package written for the IBM Personal Computer every day

IBM's original PC - the 5150 - had been the machine that spawned a whole new era of generic, dull and identi-kit computers which ended up trouncing everything that had gone before. However, this was...

Ask an expert why the Electron's the best micro in its class

Here's another advert for the Acorn Electron, the cut-down version of the BBC Micro. In common with many other Electron adverts, it stresses the fact that it's mostly the same as the expensive £400...