1985 adverts

Victor: The power to control won't cost you the Earth

From a somewhat baffling advert featuring a raging dude who looks like a cross between Bill Bixby as David Banner and Lou Ferigno as the Hulk in the 80s TV series The Incredible Hulk, comes the VPC 15....

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...

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,...

RM Nimbus: Success breeds success

After selling what seems like the same machine since forever, or at least 1977 - the Research Machines 380Z - RM has finally stepped into the world of the IBM PC. Except that it's not quite - it ran...

£79.99 all in: the Commodore Communications Modem

Way before the masses discovered the joys of the Internet (as in after 1995), there existed a vibrant dial-up community using Bulletin Boards and infotext/Viewdata services like Prestel. Commodore had...

At last, the business PC you can welcome like an old friend

Not to be left out in the stampede for IBM PCs and their compatible ilk (it's four years since the IBM PC launched), comes this offering from Commodore for its version. This particular machine - the...

The Commodore 128. When you look at the facts, they do seem to weigh rather heavily in our favour.

The 128 was Commodore's last 8-bit computer and was released in 1985, although news of the 128 started appearing at the end of 1984, with Popular Computing Weekly saying that "Commodore is working on...

Buy one of these Commodore peripherals for £199.99 and get a Seiko RC-1000 free!

It's another advert depicting the mid-1980s rage-du-jour of the "wrist terminal", in the form of the Seiko RC-1000 (also seen here). Smart watches or wearables seem to pop up every decade or so as the...

Trying to play all the games you can get for the Sinclair Spectrum could kill you (about 5,000 times)

Perhaps the first time that "software sold a machine" was when the release of VisiCalc saved the Apple II in 1979, but certainly by the mid 1980s the availability of software had become a significant...

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...

Introducing the new PC Quattro from ICL

The multi-user ICL Quattro - so-called because it could support up to four users - was a development of the RAIR Black Box - the machine which ICL had already used as its first "ICL PC". It seems to show...

Memotech Personal Computer

Thanks to the lead-time involved in placing adverts in a monthly magazine, which seemed to be around six to eight weeks, Memotech had already gone bust, or was on the cusp of it, by the time this one...