1983 adverts

Commodore 700: It's a picture - and it's worth a thousand words

With a case popularly believed to have been designed by Ferdinand Porsche, but which was actually designed by Commodore's regular industrial designer Ira Velinsky, an on-board 6509 CPU and an option of...

A two-minute operation turns your BBC Micro into the heart of a word-processor

Although didn't do much outside its home market, the Acorn BBC Micro Model B was quite a big thing in the UK. Its popularity in the UK was largely thanks to a unique collaboration with the BBC, which...

Introducing the Micronix 80HD - a complete microcomputer on a single board

Single board computers - like the Raspberry Pi - are still quite popular, especially with hobbyists as they're often small and have low power requirements. The fun with this advert is that whilst a...

Commodore VIC-20 - Let Commodore expand your horizons

Even though the Commodore 64 had been launched the year before, the VIC-20 was still shifting units - it would end up selling over 2.5 million before it was discontinued in 1985, mostly thanks to being...

Introducing the Tandy Micro Executive Workstation

Proving that it's possible to stretch out a model name to any possible extreme, comes the "Micro Executive Work Station" (MEWS), otherwise known as the TRS-80 Model 100 - the TRS-80 being a 1977-vintage...

Rainbow 100 - It's The Complete System for Complete Solutions

No collection of adverts about the early computer industry would be complete without at least one featuring Digital - otherwise known as Digital Equipment Corporation or DEC. This was the company that...

COMX-35 - the new world in family microcomputers

Designed in the Netherlands by Noxon AB and produced by the Hong Kong-based company COMX World Operations Limited - a trading-name of Video Technology - the little-known COMX-35 was if nothing else unusual...

Just How Big a Difference is there Between Digital and Other Personal Computer Manufacturers?

This advert is primarily worth including because it has a nice picture of the Grand Canyon in the background. It's not for any particular machine, rather it's to advertise DEC as safe, reliable company...

RAIR: When it's time to stop playing games and get down to business

RAIR by name and rare by nature, if the lack of information about either the machine or the company (apart from at oldcomputers.com) is anything to go by. The company did, however, appear to start out...

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...

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...

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....

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...

If only he'd bought a Commodore computer

The Commodore 700, and its cheaper sibling the 500, were short-lived entrants in Commodore's business range. Confusingly named as the B128, B256 or CBM 128/256-80 in the US or the 700 series in Europe,...

Alphatext: the WP system that stands alone

Here's an advert for another dedicated word-processing system, in an era where it seems that the idea that general-purpose computers could do word processing as well as other things seems to have passed...