A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

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

Just three 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...

Victor: The power to control won't cost you the Earth

From a somewhat baffling advert featuring a raging dude who looks like a cross between Bill Bixby as David Banner and Lou Ferigno as the Hulk in the 80s TV series The Incredible H...

Type and Talk Speech Computer

The Type and Talk Speech Computer was built by Namal Peripherals of Gwydir Street in Cambridge, and distributed by the Cambridge Microcomputer Centre of nearby-ish East Road. Th...

COSMAC VIP: $249 gets the entire family into creating video games

RCA's COSMAC VIP was a small kit-built microcomputer, based around the COSMAC - COmplementary Symmetry Monolithic Array Computer - CPU and which was aimed at the video market crea...

BCL's 3000 Series: First choice in the Top Ten

The original BCL - Business Computers Limited - was formed in 1968 as a result of the merger of Systemation Ltd and Business Mechanisation Ltd. This company actually went bust i...

Pluto: run rings around the competition!

The Pluto graphics card from IO Research, first launched in 1982, could perhaps lay claim to being one of the first "high end" graphics cards aimed at consumers. Re-sold by Nasco...

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 ...

One Sol-20 equals three computers.

Here's another advert for Processor Technology's Sol-20 - the microcomputer designed by Lee Felsenstein in 1976. It's offering the Sol-20 in three bundles - the Sol System I, II...

The Commodore 64 is compact and nippy. But its memory... well that's a little different.

Commodore was clearly milking the "elephants have a long memory" thing as this advert for the Commodore 64, first launched at the Hanover Computer Fair in April 1982, shows. It ...

Never in the history of business systems has so little done so much

Both the "budget" Amiga 500 and higher-end A2000 were announced at the same time during the winter CES show in Las Vegas in 1987. However, Commodore actually managed to start shi...

It's only £695. And that's the last reason you should buy it.

The Commodore 500 was part of the CBM-II Series - an attempt to produce an update for the original Commodore PET and seen as the company's last chance to break the business market...

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 ...

Newbury. Growing mighty with the micros

Newbury Laboratories will forever be associated with the NewBrain - the small, portable micro that was temporarily the choice to be the BBC Microcomputer. However, development w...

Britain can still find an extra byte

Here's an advert from the curiously-named Computer Ancilliaries Limited, for two of its machines - the British-built Caltext Word Processor and the Caltext Micro. The former was ...

Turn your Apple into the world's most versatile personal computer.

This is a real curiosity from Microsoft which shows how different the company was before the power of its coming hegemony with Intel and its own MS-DOS - and later Windows operati...