A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

I'm happy and proud to present your friendly IBM personal computer

The IBM PC, a.k.a 5150 had been launched in the US in 1981, but had only been unofficially available in the UK via the grey import market since the summer of 1982. It was being imported by companies...

The Company Computer vs. the Personal Computer

1983 had been the year of Ethernet, with 3Com breaking cover as the first commercial manufacturer, with its network card appearing in January on the Altos micro. At the time it was considered a risky...

Unicorn - Five new channels for the BBC. Here's the full programme.

A few months before the launch of Torch's Graduate - an attempt at a complete IBM PC "plug-in module" for the BBC - comes the Unicorn. This was a range of what were effectively entire computers in a...

GENIE - able

Here's a simple advert from Lowe Computers - formerly Lowe Electronics - the sole UK importers of the Genie series of computers, built by enigmatic Hong Kong company EACA and which nicely sums up the...

Galaxy 2 Computer System - Whatever requirements you have

This advert for the British-made Galaxy 2, from Gemini Microcomputers of Amersham, Buckinghamshire, seemed to have been around for ever - in fact the spec of twin Z80A processors with twin 400K 5.25"...

Free software, only £225

Looking much like its contemporary - the Prestel adapter - and with the same BBC Micro case-matching shape, Acorn's new Teletext adapter was perhaps better value as at least the content was free and didn't...

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 external 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...

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...