1982 adverts

Britain can still find an extra byte

Here's an advert from the curiously-named Computer Ancilliaries Limited, for what at first appear to be two of its machines - the British-built Caltext Word Processor and the Caltext Micro - but which...

Your starter for £150 - the Commodore VIC-20

Commodore was fairly unconventional in its approach to selling computers: rather than just using the traditional tech outlets like Radio Shack, or electronics and nerd magazines, it elected to also sell...

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 Alberquerque, New Mexico,...

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 by John Marshall. The...

Victor 9000 - The All-Conquering Business System

Lightning 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-only version of the Sirius...

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 Proton, aka BBC Micro. ...

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 hardware comes this advert...

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 I (with built-in tape)...

Durango: See our intelligent little space conqueror and you'll know why he's green

This advert, which features a green Mekon - the alien character from British 1950s comic Dan Dare - is for one of the least computer-ey micros in the entire collection: the Durango 700, distributed in...

Atari Star Raiders: New game, private property

This "advert", which appeared in the pre-Christmas edition of Personal Computer World and which encourages infringers to write to Graham Daubney - who would later become director of developments for Spectrum...

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, known as the "BC2", was a...

Fortune 32:16 - Minicomputer Performance at Microcomputer Price

Based in San Carlos, California, Fortune was founded as a start-up in October 1981 with $8.5 million dollars which, at about [[6|1981]] million in [[now]] terms, was possibly the largest seed investment...

Oric-1: The computer challenge

The Oric was aimed very much at Sinclair's ZX Spectrum market, with even the models and price being similar. It actually started out significantly cheaper than the Spectrum at £99.95, compared to the...

Imagine a totally portable computer that slips into your briefcase. We did

Considered by some as the first "true" laptop, Epson's HX-20 was actually designed - in 1980 - by Yukio Yokozawa, an employee of Seiko. It ran two Hitachi 6301 CPUs - a clone of Motorola's 6800 - at...

TI's Home Computer. Unbeatable value. Unrivalled software.

The original TI99/4 had been released back in 1979 and was the first ever 16-bit home computer, running TI's own TMS 9900 CPU. It didn't get off to a good start in the UK, as early models of the micro...

Nascom means performance. Nascom means solutions

Nascom - now owned by car-parts-to-semiconductors industrial conglomerate Lucas Industries, or at least its Lucas Logic division - is still trundling on with its re-packaged Nascom 2 motherboard in a...