1983 adverts

Atari 400 and 800: More K's, Less £'s

Excepting an egregious use of "less" instead of "fewer", this advert nicely shows Atari's 400 and 800 machines, which had been launched in 1978 but didn't make it to the UK until 1981 or so. The project...

It's not all Greek to Context

The Context was built by C/WP (Computers/Word Processors) of the UK from a design bought from Ontel in the US, where it was known as the Amigo. It was a dual-CPU machine, with a Zilog Z80A plus 64K RAM...

For those that do, those that don't and those that might

The Japanese Sord M5, launched in October 1982 at the Tokyo Data Show, was one of a handful of computers - a group which included the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Jupiter Ace - that decided not to provide...

The new TI Professional Computer. If you want the business edge, it's the answer

Just a few months before Texas Instruments announced that due to poor sales of its TI99/4A home micro it was exiting the consumer and home-computer business, comes this advert for its TI Professional....

The Tiger from HH

Whilst there had already been a few computers produced by regular electronics companies, such as Heathkit with its H9, there's probably no other example of a company that was famous for building amplifiers...

Sage Computer Technology: The wise man's choice

The Sage family of micros, looking as they do like external 5.25" floppy disk units in this advert - which is another accessiblity fail with its low-contrast black-text-on-dark-brown colour scheme - seemed...

ICL: We should be talking to each other

By the late 1960s, the once diverse British computer industry had - via a series of mergers - coalesced around just two major computer groups: International Computers and Tabulators (ICT), which had formed...

The battle is over: MS-DOS has become the dominant 16-bit operating system

There's nothing like a bit of gloating, and this advert certainly has it in spades, featuring as it does a set of quotes about how Microsoft's MS-DOS had killed off CP/M to become the industry standard....

Galaxy 2 Computer System - Whatever requirements you have

This advert for the British-made Galaxy 2, from Gemini Microcomputers of Amersham, Buckinghamshire, seemed to have been around for ever - in fact the spec of twin Z80A processors with twin 400K 5.25"...

If you want to know which computer to buy, ask your expert.

This is another of those adverts popular at the time which like to suggest that anyone over 20 couldn't possibly know how to use a computer. It was largely true. Before the home micro explosion, computers...

Microcomputers? Let Rank Xerox point you in the right direction

Hugely influential in the early computer industry with its Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) spawning computer fundamentals like Ethernet, Laser printers and the graphical user interface - a preview...

The Commodore 64. Under $600

It's another Commodore advert, from August 1983, playing to Jack Tramiel's famous adage "Computers for the masses, not the classes". The origin of this famous quote dates back to 1980, which Michael...

The Remarkable SV-318 Personal Computer

The Spectravideo SV-318 was a Zilog Z80A-based computer with 32K RAM and Microsoft BASIC, which had been the de-facto standard on pretty much every computer since the MITS Altair of 1975. When launched...

The Epson HX-20: for Business on the Move

Considered to be the world's first true mobile computer, the HX-20 came from a company better known for the printers which it had been producing for 20 years. The HX-20 was first announced in 1981 but...

Qume - A New Range of Video Terminals

Whilst the world of small-business and home computers was in a raging turmoil with hundreds of random machines coming and going, one thing remained a constant - the world of the terminal. Frankly, beyond...