A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

A history of communications: part 1

This colourful and quintessentially 80s advert from Torch was one of two sequential adverts in PCW and provides a nice summary of the company's output so far. This includes the original Communicator...

CP/M Graphics - your ticket to success

Intergalactic Digital Research was founded by Gary Kildall, along with his wife Dorothy Kildall, in 1976, three years after Kildall first wrote CP/M - the first-ever disk operating system for a microcomputer....

If you want to help with research, buy someone else's computer

At almost the anatomically complete-opposite end of the scale to Commodore's Maureen the Elephant comes this advert featuring cute guinea pigs, from little-known Globe Business Machines Ltd, which seems...

Meet Adam: the Colecovision family computer system

Coleco's Adam was announced in a "blaze of publicity" during the summer of 1983 and appeared to be a major breakthrough in price, with POCW suggesting that it provided a system comparable to machines...

Get even more attached to your Amstrad

Many computer companies of the time seemed to be happy to rely on third parties to produce peripherals for their machines, particularly Acorn which was famous for its long timescales in developing anything...

Micromation Z-Plus Microcomputer System

On the one hand, the Micromation Z-Plus Microcomputer System - sold in the UK via Rostronics - was a fairly standard computer of the day, with a Zilog Z80 CPU, 64K of memory, S-100 bus, Digital Research's...

Compukit UK101 - Low-cost Superboard in kit form

The Compukit UK101 was effectively an unauthorised UK clone of Ohio Scientific's Superboard II - the single-board computer which gave rise to Ohio's fridge-sized machines like the C3-B. The UK101 was...

ABC 80 - The new powerful personal computer from Sweden

It would be easy to think of the personal computer revolution as being a purely US and UK thing, although these were by far the largest and most active markets. There were, however, home-grown computers...

Some new hoops for the Dragon to jump through

This advert for Dragon software comes at a time when the company was going through yet another financial crises, which this time involved an additional investor injection of £2.5 million, triggered by...

MSI 6800 - At the root of every good system

The MSI 6800, from Midwest Scientific Instruments, was a Motorola MC6800-based system running at 2MHz on SWTPC's SS-50 bus. It was first launched in 1977. The MC6800 could nominally support 64K of memory,...

ZX Microdrive - Now on release

Sounding something like a statement on the fate of a serial murderer from a top-security prison, this advert, which was part of one of Sinclair's regular "mini magazines" within the magazine they were...

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...

The world's best personal computer for under £500

Sinclair was nothing if not bold with its claims, including this one that the Spectrum - announced just a few months before at a press conference at the Churchill Hotel on Friday, 23rd April 1982 - was...

Get your hands on the new Sinclair 128K +2. Before everybody else does

Released under the management of Amstrad, which had bought Sinclair for its name and assets on April 7th 1986, the Plus 2 was launched without much fanfare in the August of the same year. It was then...

Now, the complete MK 14 micro-computer system from Science of Cambridge

Right on the cusp of the launch of the ZX80, Science of Cambridge was still selling its MK 14 - or Microcomputer Kit 14 - which had been launched back in the summer of 1978. The price was still broadly...