A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

Triton One-Board Computer

The Triton one-board computer started life jointly sponsored by Transam and Electronics Today International (ETI), as a sort of cross-marketing collaboration. Transam provided t...

Is the information revolution passing you by? Nightingale - The Modem

[extra: hamish_dialup_1985.webp|A Nightingale modem in action in 1984 or 1985, connected to a BBC Micro]The mid-1980s - 1984 to 1986 in particular - were notable for the destructi...

Get things going - with the Philips portable P2000C

The spec of this machine makes it seem almost like an update to 1984's KayPro, with a similar 9" green-screen monitor and 5¼" floppies - in this version capable of storing up to 6...

It does accounts, projections, wordprocessing and 180mph

Only months after Amstrad had released the CPC 664, it was back with an entry in the battle-du-jour which by late summer of 1985 was all about 128K micros. Whilst not really off...

Epson HX-20: It could mean the end of the rubber duck as we know it

From the time when the only colours allowed in anyone's decorative colour scheme were black, red and grey comes this advert from Epson. It's perhaps one of the more irresponsibl...

There's one thing about this MSX that isn't quite standard - the price tag

This entry in the MSX hall-of-fame is slightly unusual in that GoldStar is not a Japanese company, as nearly all MSX builders were, but Korean. With a style that looks as if it ...

Samurai - your powerful ally

Despite fears of an imminent Japanese invasion going right back to almost the start of the Personal Computer revolution, not much really happened until Microsoft-sponsored Japanes...

The home computer that means business - Amstrad CPC664

When interviewed about the upcoming Atari ST, former Commodore founder and all-round legend Jack Tramiel said "Home computer? I never heard of it - I make personal computers". I...

The MSX micro that's paid its musical dues

Luckily for the incumbent micro manufacturers of the UK and the US, the Japanese - whose invasion had been feared since the late 1970s - were surprisingly late to the party. Whe...

The 520ST. Over-qualified and under-paid

After resigning from Commodore in January 1984 - the business he founded as a typewriter repair outfit in the 1950s, and the company that produced the world's first all-in-one "pe...

Oric-1 - created by Tangerine

Tangerine had been around since 1978, and had previously been selling a 6502-based one-board computer called the Microtan 65. This was abandoned after around 10,000 systems had ...

Probably the fastest computer in the universe - the Jupiter Ace

Perhaps this early advert for the Jupiter Ace - an 8-bit Z80-based micro designed by ex-Sinclair engineers Richard Altwasser and Steven Vickers, both of whom had worked on the ZX ...

Memotech explores the excellence of your ZX81

Memotech, the company which would end up producing its own range of well-regarded almost-MSX machines during 1984, started out as a producer of memory and interface expansions for...

Microcomputers? Let Rank Xerox point you in the right direction

Hugely influential in the early computer industry with its Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) spawning computer fundamentals like Ethernet, Laser printers and the graphical us...

Bywood SCRUMPI: 2 + 3 = ?

Had it not been for one of The Register's great articles on one of the forgotten pioneers of the early computer scene, this advert from Bywood, a company founded in Hemel Hempstea...