A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

Key into Maxi-power @ Micro-price

ECD was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November 1974. Its first products were a capacitance meter and an industrial digital thermometer, both of which sold well. At the ...

Discover the secrets of the RAIR Black Box

It's an enigmatic advert from an enigmatic company - RAIR - for its original Black Box microcomputer. It looks to be in almost Cadbury branding, and in keeping with the chocolat...

When you get right down to it, nobody does it better

Carly Simon might disagree that "nobody does it better", but here's a nice advert from Vector Graphic for a whole range of its S-100 boards. The boards include a Z80 board for $2...

Asda price - for every Tom, Dick and Einstein

Asda - the UK supermarket chain founded in 1965 whose name is a contraction of ASquith and DAiries - is clearly not a microcomputer company, or even any sort of computer company w...

The profesionals - Zenith Data Systems

Only months after Zenith had purchased the Heath Company from Schlumberger - forming Zenith Data System - comes this advert for a terminal and two micros. Actually, the Z89 micro...

Now we've removed the biggest obstacle between you and the famous Apple IIe

This is a curious and apparently one-off advert from Apple positioning the Apple IIe as part of a Professional Home Computer Package. It's also possibly the only Apple advert that...

The 3 best takeaways of all time

Here's an amusing advert from Epson for its "PC Portable", otherwise known as the Q150A, which was launched at the beginning of 1988 - with the hard-disk version being launched in...

How much computer can you buy for £450?

It's another advert for Amstrad's PC 1512, this time featuring a nice bit of analogue Photoshopping showing competitors' micros chopped up to represent how much you could get for ...

SuperBrain II: Summa Cum Laude!

This advert appears to be about the only one that Intertec ever did itself that actually features its SuperBrain micro, which was fairly omnipresent from its launch in 1979 and fo...

Introducing the TeleCAT-286. AT performance for £2695 complete.

TeleVideo - the terminals company founded in San Jose, California, in 1975 - was one of relatively few companies from that era which survived through the era of the IBM PC and bey...

To become the leader in terminals, Televideo had to give you more

TeleVideo was one of several companies - like Intertec - that had started out as terminal manufacturers, in its case in 1975. However unlike most other manufacturers from the 197...

That's it! The VisiSeries from VisiCorp

Any history of the early microcomputer industry would not be complete without a mention of VisiCalc - the first ever "killer app". Not only did VisiCalc create an entirely new ca...

Above all else, there is Apricot

This advert from Apricot shows the company clearly aiming at the Desktop Publishing market that Apple was coming to own since the 1985 release of Aldus Pagemaker, and Apple's even...

Now you can write 450 A4 pages into an A4-size computer

It's over three years since the launch of Clive Sinclair's Z88 portable computer, and not much has changed, except that the price is finally back to its original launch price of £...

A new kind of computer to revolutionise the way you work

Here's a nice advert ticking all the mobile-worker cliché boxes, not least the one of the dude on the train who's actually lucky enough to get a group of four seats all to himself...