1981 adverts

Micronetworks introduce PM1000

Here's a seemingly one-off advert for what also seems to be a one-off machine: the PM1000 from Micro Networks, of Pall Mall in London. It's unusual because it's one of only a han...

The Commodore Computer Range Price List

This advert is a sales-channel price list for later-model Commodore PET computers. Prices ranged from £632.50 for the entry-level 16K 40-column 12" screen PET 4016 (about £3,390 ...

Kontron: Look to tomorrow with the PSIΨ80 Microcomputer Series

It's another advert aimed at OEMs rather than the end user, this time from Kontron Mikrocomputer GmbH of Echning, near Munich in what was West Germany. Demonstrating its target m...

WHSmith: What Would I Do With a Computer?

This advert is a small A5 4-page booklet produced by UK newsagent chain WHSmith and demonstrates nicely how such regular high-street shops were very much part of the early home co...

Turn your Apple into the world's most versatile personal computer.

This is a real curiosity from Microsoft which shows how different the company was before the power of its coming hegemony with Intel and its own MS-DOS - and later Windows operati...

5¼" Winchesters - from Hotel Microsystems

Over a year before Hotel Microsystems Limited - later HM Systems - launched its first microcomputer, the Minstrel, comes this advert positioning the company as an importer and par...

Choose Atom Power

Right on the cusp of Acorn's launch of the Proton - the computer better known as the BBC Micro - comes this advert for its existing Atom, the 1980 machine which evolved from the e...

Step by step with the computer system designed for tomorrow

Tangerine Computer Systems had been founded in 1979 in St. Ives, Cambridgeshire - once the home of Clive Sinclair's Radionics company. Its first product had been the well-receive...

You don't need a degree to use a VIC-20 Home Computer - just a degree of common sense

This advert, given that it shows a Mark 1 VIC-20 without the bundled tape drive that soon came long, probably comes from late 1981 - the year that the VIC-20 was launched in the U...

Make friends with Panther... The British micro system

Here's another advert for another fairly generic Z80-based (or possibly Intel 8080) CP/M micro system, from Cyber Electronics Ltd. of Ilford in Essex. Unlike most similar adverts...

Dealers, we'll help you out of the microcomputer jungle

In the days before visual accessibility guidelines existed, and aimed more at potential dealers than the general public, this advert for Altos is actually placed by Microtex of Wi...

4MHz Z80A, 64K RAM, twin 200K disks for £1299

Here is probably the first advert of Chris Shelton's Sig/Net, launched around July or August this year. Shelton, who had once worked for Nascom, had started Shelton Instruments ...