A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

With Aquarius you won't get left behind

Very much an also-ran in the home/personal computer race comes this advert for a Mattel Aquarius - a Z80-based unit with a chiclet keyboard built for Mattel by Far East-based Rado...

Oric-1 16K and 48K Micros

The Oric-1, designed by Tangerine and manufactured by Oric Products International, a company created by Tangerine to sell the Oric - was aimed at the Sinclair Spectrum market. T...

Unique in concept - the home computer that grows as you do!

The Acorn Atom was a 6502-based 8-bit computer that in its basic version managed to pack even less RAM than the VIC-20: 2K compared to 3.5K. However, it was very modular and so ...

Why the Sinclair ZX80 is Britain's best selling computer

Just before the release of the ZX81 comes this advert for the ZX80, available in kit form for only £80, or £500 in 2025. Somewhat amusingly it claims to be "a really powerful, f...

Discover the full professional power of Hewlett-Packard's personal computer

Hewlett-Packard, which like Commodore, TI and Tandy also had a line in calculators, had launched its HP-85 micro at the beginning of 1980, with the machine even originating from t...

The Commodore PET offers you a safe passage through the primeval swamp of computerisation

This advert had a point - there were hundreds of different manufactures around at this point all producing different systems with different CPUs on different architectures, and ma...

Buy a wordprocessor for under £3,500 - and get a microcomputer for free

Well, perhaps software was a bit more expensive in the early 80s, but word processing software for £3,500 (or £18,700 in 2025 terms) seems a little steep. However, that's what t...

Astronaut quality. Everyday simplicity. The HP-41C. £184

[extra: spaceshuttle_pcw_1983-01.webp|An HP-41C in use on NASA's Shuttle simulator, © Personal Computer World, January 1983]Hewlett-Packard, like Commodore in the 1970s, was ...

Nascom 3 - from Lucas Logic

Perhaps implausibly from the company better known for car parts - belts, bulbs and oil filters and so on - comes the Nascom 3, courtesy of Lucas Logic. Lucas had bought Nascom ...

The model of good business: Tuscan - the all-British microcomputer

Perhaps the chosen name - Tuscan - in the context of "all British" was meant to be ironic, but anyway this machine, an update of the regular Tuscan which had been launched the yea...

Sinclair Owners - We'll give you £50 trade-in when you trade-up!

This is a curious attempt from Commodore to woo users of the ZX80 and ZX81 - small, low-memory and purely home computers that plugged into the television and could by held in one ...

First time on Earth - Sharp MZ-80B

Perhaps unique in laying claim to some sort of extra-terrestrial origin, comes this advert for the Sharp MZ-80B. The "large" integrated screen had 320x300 pixel resolution and i...

The new Apple III - More computer power on your desk-top

This would seem to be the "missing link" Apple computer, as the world and popular culture seems not to register anything about it, and Apple's own history seems to skip from the A...

The DAI personal computer is here - High performance - High value

When Texas Instruments was developing its TI-99/2 and TI-99/4 computers, it knew that producing a PAL/SECAM version would be a hassle. Indeed, when the TI-99/4 finally launched ...

Sinclair ZX81 Personal Computer - the heart of a system that grows with you

This advert was quite an impressive 4-page spread which featured in several computer magazines and was used to advertise the ZX81, which launched in the UK in March 1981. The ZX8...