A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

The Sinclair ZX81 Personal Computer - New High Performance, New Low Price, Same Sinclair Simplicity

Here's another advert for the Sinclair ZX81 - the computer that sold more than 1.5 million units and which almost single-handedly kick-started the computer revolution in the UK. I...

After you ask what it can do for you now, ask what it can do for you later: HP-86

More proof that it took at least a few years for the IBM PC format to bulldoze everything in its path, comes this advert for the Hewlett-Packard HP-86. Looking a bit like a very...

Why we chose the 'NCR' computer

From the days when computers took up whole rooms and secretaries stood around in front of monster tape drives smiling at cardboard, comes the NCR 390 - introduced in 1962 as a cu...

Dragon 32: There's only one thing harder than bulding a great computer. Building software to match.

The Dragon 32 was another entry in the burgeoning early-80s British computer scene and was originally developed by Mettoy, the company that also made Corgi toys. Mettoy suffered ...

Home is the last place you should learn about a home computer

Even though the Commodore 64 was on the market, there was still plenty of demand for the VIC 20, launched two years before in 1981 (or three if you count Japan, where it was test-...

Communications Engineered: The Bendix G-20 Computer System

Hot on the heels of Bendix's valve-based G-15 computer came the G-20, built with transistorised modules. It had memory comprising 32,000 32-bit words - analogous to 128K - with a...

Commodore Plus/4: Clean up your study once and for all

Here's a nice advert showing Commodore's Plus/4 as some sort of vacuum cleaner, sucking up a load of invoices, receipts and a tax return. There are some great 80s names in the i...

IBM System/360: Getting smaller... thinking bigger

This is a great advert which perfectly encapsulates the evolution of electronics in one photo. It shows what is effectively the same functional component and how it has evolved...

It's the same old Apple II, except for the front, back and inside

The Apple III, which had been released three years before in 1980, had been a relative failure, shifting only 65,000 units before it was canned, so the venerable Apple II line was...

/ability - It Comes Naturally With The Altair 8800b

Another nice advert for the later-model Intel 8080-based Altair 8800b, showing several system boards rising out of its chassis. According to Wikipedia, the Altair 8800 was the mach...

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-...

The Jupiter Ace: Clever enough for Forth, dumb enough to sell for £90

The Jupiter Ace, launched in August 1982, was an unusual entry into the canon of early 1980s British home computers. Although it was Yet Another Z80 Machine, it was different in ...

ZX Spectrum - 16K or 48K RAM from only £125!

This advert is part of an impressive four-page spread that appeared early in 1983 for the Sinclair Spectrum, launched at the end of April 1982 but which took eight weeks until fir...

If it isn't Shugart, it isn't Minifloppy

The apocryphal story tells of a meeting in a restaurant with a customer who complained that the 8" floppy drives of the day were just too big for the smaller "personal computers" ...

Sol. The small computer that won't fence you in

An interesting advert, nicely shot on a dried lake somewhere in the American south west, that's quite honest, for a change, about the fact that it's not particularly cheap and whi...