A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

All microcomputers are made for tomorrow. But what about the day after?

Here's another also-ran in the micro stakes from yet another typewriter company - Olympia International. The curiously-named "People" was an 8086-based machine that ran either CP/M-86, MS-DOS or GSX-86....

The battle is over: MS-DOS has become the dominant 16-bit operating system

There's nothing like a bit of gloating, and this advert certainly has it in spades, featuring as it does a set of quotes about how Microsoft's MS-DOS had killed off CP/M to become the industry standard....

Haywood: When the British make something, it's really something

It's tempting with 20/20 hindsight to giggle about bespoke single-task machines like the oddly-named Haywood 9000 Composite in the light of the all-purpose IBM Micro, which dawned at the end of 1981....

ICL: We should be talking to each other

By the late 1960s, the once diverse British computer industry had - via a series of mergers - coalesced around just two major computer groups: International Computers and Tabulators (ICT), which had formed...

Hyperion - The world's most powerful portable computer

Sadly, this particular Gulfstream was nothing to do with the rarified world of luxury executive jets but was rather more prosaically a subsidiary of Canadian company Bytec. The Hyperion portable was...

Sage Computer Technology: The wise man's choice

The Sage family of micros, looking as they do like 5.25" floppy disk units in this advert - which is another accessiblity fail with its low-contrast black-text-on-dark-brown colour scheme - seemed to...

Cifer: When a microprocessor costs £3, why make do with one?

The Series 1, from Wiltshire-based Cifer - a company which had been "at the forefront of computer technology for over ten years" and which had a "bread and butter business in terminals" and a turnover...

The Tiger from HH

Whilst there had already been a few computers produced by regular electronics companies, such as Heathkit with its H9, there's probably no other example of a company that was famous for building amplifiers...

Kenneth Kendall: Now in chip form

This advert is for a speech synthesis chip for the BBC Micro which used the voice of one of the greats of 1970s television news broadcasting - Kenneth Kendall. It's a nice bit of circular reference...

Discover the remarkable NCR Decision Mate V

Hot on the heels (well, not really) of 1962's NCR 390, comes National Cash Register's Decision Mate V. It was a dual-processor machine, with an 8-bit Zilog Z80 and a 16-bit Intel 8088, two 360K floppy...

NEC personal computers

NEC was another of those companies, like Texas Instruments and Commodore, that was vertically intergrated - in this case making the computers as well as - according to the advert - most of the components...

Solve the "Which microcomputer to buy" puzzle in six easy moves

There's nothing quite like an advert without a photo of the thing you're selling to really promote it, although this one does at least feature a custom Rubik's cube. That's maybe because this appears...

There are spreadsheets and spreadsheets. And there's Multiplan

Multiplan was part of the wave of spreadsheet software that followed on from the release of VisiCalc for the Apple II in 1979. It had been written in such a way that it could be easily ported, and so...

Intertec offers the warranty your first computer should have offered

Intertec - based in Columbia, South Carolina, US - had been founded as a terminal manufacturer in 1973. It then launched its Z80-based SuperBrain micro in 1979, which seemed to be everywhere throughout...

Personal computers from Fujitsu. Japan's leading computer manufacturer

Founded in 1923 as a joint venture between Furukawa Electric Co. Limited and Seimens of Germany, originally as a telecommunications company, Fujitsu was part of the much-feared Japanese invasion of the...