1983 adverts

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 w...

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 Popular Computing Weekly suggesting that it ...

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...