A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

Transam: The Exciting New Triton Personal Computer

The Transam Triton was a British-built Intel 8080A-based kit computer that was first released in December 1978. It was initially launched as a joint project with Electronics Tod...

Three Trumps from Acorn: The Acorn Microcomputer

Acorn was founded as Cambridge Processor Unit (CPU) in November 1978 by Hermann Hauser, who had moved to the UK from Vienna at the age of 15, and Chris Curry - a former Science of...

Heathkit - Britain's Most Popular Kits

Heathkit was an American company that was originally founded in 1912 as the E. B. Heath Aerial Vehicle Company, an aircraft manufacturer, based in Chicago. This gives Heathkit ...

Sinclair Project 60 and the Micromatic Transistor Radio

Here is an advert from the company, or at least the Sinclair Radionics part of it, that would go on to launch the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, and in doing so change the UK compute...

Commodore 64: The World's Best-Selling Computer Now Comes ... With a Mouse

The first trackball pointing device had been invented way back in 1941 by Ralph Benjamin as part of British Royal Navy project, but the computer mouse is generally credited to Dou...

Fortune 32:16 - Minicomputer Performance at Microcomputer Price

[extra: fortuneui_praccomp_1983-01.webp|Fortune's £1 million user interface, © Practical Computing January 1983|360]Based in San Carlos, California, Fortune was founded as a ...

Transtec: If you can buy a business computer package at a lower price, I'll buy it for you

So says Noel C. May, the managing director of Transtec Computers in one of those advertising claims that would be great to know how often had to be fulfilled. The machine, know...

Colour Genie Does It All!

The EG2000, or Colour Genie, was released at about the same time as EACA International's update to its original 1981 monster computer, the Video Genie. By now known as the Genie ...

Toshiba T-200: Reliable hardware is not enough

Long before Toshiba had the "Hello Tosh, Got a Toshiba?" line with its laptops and a couple of years before it joined the Microsoft-backed MSX attempt to set a new standard in har...

Camputers Lynx: How to increase the size of your memory

Camputers was formed in the winter of 1981 as Camtronic Circuits - a spin-off from GW Design Services, a company that had already provided PCB design services to Acorn for the Pro...

Victor 9000 - The All-Conquering Business System

Lighting and sensitive electronics is always such a great combination, and it's used to the max in this advert for the Victor 9000, a machine which was meant to have been a US-onl...

British Micro: Now Other Micros Are Less Than Perfect

At first sight this is another obscure entry in the who/what/where department, however British Micro was connected to the more famous Nascom and Gemini Microcomputer, both founded...

Microsoft: MS-DOS gives you the only complete set of tools for 16-bit systems

If there was once company that, for good or bad, has influenced the early home and business computer industry more than any other, it has to be Microsoft. Formed in 1975 in Albe...

Hewlett-Packard Calculators - The First Family

The first half of the 1970s was something of a boom time for calculator manufacturers, a situation triggered by the arrival of the first "calculator on a chip" integrated circuits...

Climax 60: If you know what's good for you - you'll take our PICK

If choice of operating system is anything to go by, then this particular machine is fairly unusual. It features Pick - a multi-user multivalued database system which, whilst not...