1983 adverts

If you want flexibility and expandability, then you want the Microtan 65

The Microtan 65 was a single-board computer first built by Tangerine in 1980. Available as either a kit, or ready assembled, Tangerine sold around 10,000 of the 6502-based boards b...

A history of communications: part 1

This colourful and quintessentially 80s advert from Torch was one of two sequential adverts in Personal Computer World and provides a nice summary of the company's output so far. ...

The unbeatable TI home computer. It's all the computers your family will ever need

TI's pushing of Commodore out of the calculator market in the 1970s had come back to haunt it in 1983 - the year of this advert. When TI, which had been manufacturing the calcul...

The Comart Communicator: One computer system that won't sink in to obsolescence

One popular theme that ran through microcomputer advertising throughout this era is that of a simmering paranoia about being "left behind". This was, of course, understandable a...

Lisa is much more than a computer

Featured in this back-of-the magazine third-party advert, the ill-fated Lisa was the first mass-market computer to offer the full "WIMP" - Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer - experie...

The computer with the story!

It may have had a story to tell, but it seems to be a fairly conventional one, being as it was a 64K CP/M luggable, complete with a built-in carry handle. On the upside, it did h...

Enterprise - a 16 bit business computer from only £2,300

Data General was a minicomputer manufacturer which was established in 1968 by Edson de Castro, the former manager of DEC's PDP-8 program. A year later it released the Nova minico...

Apricot - the 4th generation personal computer

ACT - Applied Computer Techniques - of Dudley, near Birmingham, had been set up in 1965 as a time-sharing bureau. In then diversified into reselling office equipment and produci...

The best software on earth comes from Psion

Psion had been founded in 1980 by David Potter, who had been born in South Africa but who had moved to the UK to study science at Cambridge University. He went on to get a doctora...

The Commodore 8296 Business Computer puts power at your command

Released in 1983, the 8296 was the last of the PET line - the world's first personal computer, which had been first shown at Chicago CES in January 1977. Commodore had already tr...

At £1,795 it can only be a Miracle

The Miracle, from Portico, was another British-built Z80 machine running CP/M, but is clearly aiming at the Osborne/Kaypro "luggable" market. When the Osborne 1 launched in 1981,...

Zorba: The portable personal with more

This almost-comedy wannabe hack at the Osborne and Kaypro market, with its claim that cramming 80 columns on to a 7" screen is somehow a good thing, appeared in 1983 and was consi...

Mass Data Storage from less than £1,000

Keeping up with a tradition almost as old as advertising itself, the price shown isn't quite the price you pay as it doesn't include VAT or shipping, but it's still interesting th...

ZX Microdrive - Now on release

Sounding something like a statement on the fate of a serial murderer from a top-security prison, this advert, which was part of one of Sinclair's regular "mini magazines" within t...

Some new hoops for the Dragon to jump through

This advert for Dragon software comes at a time when the company was going through yet another financial crises, which this time involved an additional investor injection of £2.5 ...