1984 adverts

Commodore 64: It's not how much you pay, it's how much you get

In the era of the IBM PC, this Commodore advert compares the price and features of the Commodore 64 and the IBM PCJr. Known by IBM's codename of the "Peanut", the Junior was nev...

Make the BBC an expert at communications

Prism was an interesting company that, although not hugely famous by itself, had a hand in all sorts of areas of the UK microcomputer industry. It started out life as the sole di...

Amstrad's new CPC 464 comes with plenty of free plugs

Harking back to the early all-in-one computers of the late 1970s - not least the very first, 1977's Commodore's PET with its built-in cassette player - comes Alan Michael Sugar Tr...

The new Mitsubishi MSX computers

Mitsubishi - a Japanese company perhaps more famous for heavy plant like diggers and bulldozers, as well as cars and home electronics - was one of the wave of mostly-Japanese manu...

There's one thing about this MSX that isn't quite standard - the price tag

This entry in the MSX hall-of-fame is slightly unusual in that GoldStar is not a Japanese company, as nearly all MSX builders were, but Korean. With a style that looks as if it ...

On average, there is one new software package written for the IBM Personal Computer every day

IBM's original PC - the 5150 - had been the machine that spawned a whole new era of generic, dull and identi-kit computers which ended up trouncing everything that had gone before...

Olivetti - Compatibility plus!

Along with almost every major manufacturer of the time, Olivetti was not one to refuse a spot on the bandwagon that was the IBM PC format. Here, it's offering an 8086 "true 16 bi...

Laskys - Win a Peugeot 205 GT

Here's another advert for non-computer company Laskys, stalwart of the micro revolution on the High Streets of the UK for several years. Laskys adverts often represent the zeitg...

The best thing next to a BBC Micro

Available at around the same time as Torch's "Graduate", Torch's Z80-based ZEP100 was considered by Personal Computer News to be by far the better system out of the two for BBC Mi...

The answer is an Apricot from ComputerWorld

Applied Computer Techniques - ACT - had previously been importing the Chuck Peddle-designed Victor 9000, which was known as the ACT Sirius in the UK, and before that it was a supp...

Tandata Tm 200: Open up a new world of communications to your micro

Tandata Design Consultants formed out of Tangerine, the makers of the Microtan 65, as a designer and manufacturer of modems and communications equipment. The top end of Tandata's ...

Here's an up-front saving on the Tandy 16K Colour Computer 2

Here's a festively-themed advert for the second version of Tandy's Colour Computer 2, or "CoCo". With £20 off coz it's Christmas, the CoCo was available for only £99.95 - only £...

The Wren Executive: Carry the company in your hand, not on your shoulders

Billed as a portable, but really just a luggable along the lines of the much earlier IMSAI PCS-80/30 from 1978 or the more contemporary KayPro, the Wren was built by Thorn/EMI, a ...

From a Single Comart Workstation... The Mighty Comart System Grows

This is another entry in the IBM-alike pantheon, from one of several companies of the time that started out as re-sellers or importers. Comart had been importing systems from co...

American take-away

The first company to produce a clone of IBM's PC BIOS had been Columbia, but the second - and the first to do it legally - was Compaq, a company set up in 1982 and whose first pro...

Our Rivals are Speechless: The Apricot Portable

Here's an advert for the Apricot Portable - the first portable computer anywhere to offer a speech recognition system, with a four-thousand word vocabulary and the ability to unde...

Gemini: Customised Computers, at off-the-peg prices

Gemini Microcomputers, of Amersham in Buckinghamshire, seems to have based its entire existance on more-or-less the same thing - boards built around the Z80 CPU and running CP/M, ...

The report you are waiting for: simple, factual, honest and 100% biased

This advert was part of a lavish four-page spread in the December 1984 edition of Personal Computer World. It's obviously Christmas as there's a Santa under the entry for "X" for ...