A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

Asda price - for every Tom, Dick and Einstein

Asda - the UK supermarket chain founded in 1965 whose name is a contraction of ASquith and DAiries - is clearly not a microcomputer company, or even any sort of computer company w...

The profesionals - Zenith Data Systems

Only months after Zenith had purchased the Heath Company from Schlumberger - forming Zenith Data System - comes this advert for a terminal and two micros. Actually, the Z89 micro...

Now we've removed the biggest obstacle between you and the famous Apple IIe

This is a curious and apparently one-off advert from Apple positioning the Apple IIe as part of a Professional Home Computer Package. It's also possibly the only Apple advert that...

The 3 best takeaways of all time

Here's an amusing advert from Epson for its "PC Portable", otherwise known as the Q150A, which was launched at the beginning of 1988 - with the hard-disk version being launched in...

How much computer can you buy for £450?

It's another advert for Amstrad's PC 1512, this time featuring a nice bit of analogue Photoshopping showing competitors' micros chopped up to represent how much you could get for ...

SuperBrain II: Summa Cum Laude!

This advert appears to be about the only one that Intertec ever did itself that actually features its SuperBrain micro, which was fairly omnipresent from its launch in 1979 and fo...

Introducing the TeleCAT-286. AT performance for £2695 complete.

TeleVideo - the terminals company founded in San Jose, California, in 1975 - was one of relatively few companies from that era which survived through the era of the IBM PC and bey...

To become the leader in terminals, Televideo had to give you more

TeleVideo was one of several companies - like Intertec - that had started out as terminal manufacturers, in its case in 1975. However unlike most other manufacturers from the 197...

That's it! The VisiSeries from VisiCorp

Any history of the early microcomputer industry would not be complete without a mention of VisiCalc - the first ever "killer app". Not only did VisiCalc create an entirely new ca...

Above all else, there is Apricot

This advert from Apricot shows the company clearly aiming at the Desktop Publishing market that Apple was coming to own since the 1985 release of Aldus Pagemaker, and Apple's even...

Now you can write 450 A4 pages into an A4-size computer

It's over three years since the launch of Clive Sinclair's Z88 portable computer, and not much has changed, except that the price is finally back to its original launch price of £...

A new kind of computer to revolutionise the way you work

Here's a nice advert ticking all the mobile-worker cliché boxes, not least the one of the dude on the train who's actually lucky enough to get a group of four seats all to himself...

Psion MC400

Launched in 1989, the Psion MC 400 - for Mobile Computer - was Psion's first entry into the nascent "netbook" market. Although based on a CMOS version of Intel's 8086 - the 80C86 ...

If only all personal computers were this big

The Psion Series 3 - launched in 1991 - was an update of the popular Organiser II (itself an update of the original Organiser), which by 1989 had sold a combined 300,000 and prope...

Announcing a computer that thinks in BASIC for only $298

Ohio Scientific seemed to only ever advertise variations of its Challenger series of sometimes-fridge-sized microcomputers, however here is the exception that proves the rule - th...