1983 adverts

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 minicomputer, which was the...

Apricot - the 4th generation personal computer

ACT - Applied Computer Techniques - of Dudley, near Birmingham, was set up in 1965 as a mainframe accounting bureau by Roger Foster. Foster had left Wolverhampton Grammar School in 1957 before qualifying...

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 doctorate at Imperial College,...

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 tried to update its PET...

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, it completely reset...

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 considered as one of the last...

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 that the magic number of...

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 the magazine they were...

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 million, triggered by...

The new MPF1 Plus - The lowest-cost Z80 computer with all these features!

The Microprofessor MPF-1 Plus was a redesigned version of the original MPF-1, originally released by Multitech Industrial Corporation in the summer of 1982. Its launch came after the company had released...

Micronet 800: Tunes your BBC into a new channel of news, views, facts and fun

Micronet was a popular subsection of the dial-up information system Prestel. Prestel - which shared a technological specification with television Viewdata systems like Ceefax and Oracle - had been launched...

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 was one of several adverts...

Asda price - for every Tom, Dick and Einstein

Asda - the UK supermarket chain founded in 1965 whose name is a contraction of ASquith and DAiries - is clearly not a microcomputer company, or even any sort of computer company whatsoever. Its inclusion...

Meet Adam: the Colecovision family computer system

Coleco's Adam was announced in a "blaze of publicity" during the summer of 1983 and appeared to be a major breakthrough in price, with POCW suggesting that it provided a system comparable to machines...

Now we've removed the biggest obstacle between you and the famous Apple IIe

This is a curious and apparently one-off advert from Apple positioning the Apple IIe as part of a Professional Home Computer Package. It's also possibly the only Apple advert that exhibited any sort of...