1984 adverts

Mentathlete - the Sinclair ZX Spectrum

This is a slightly abstract advert for the ZX Spectrum, which appeared on the back of a home computer course. It shows an all-metal dude, like the T-1000 in Terminator 2, reaching...

Sord M5: At last, a home computer that improves with age

It's another advert for the Sord M5, known in the UK as the CGL M5, on account of its distributor. It ran a Zilog Z80A, along with the same video chip as the MSX standard, making...

How to program your family with a VIC 20 computer

Despite the fact that the much-superior Commodore 64 had been around for a couple of years, the VIC-20 was still selling units, and would go on to sell about 2.5 million before be...

As your experience grows, so can your Atari 600XL

The 600XL was one of two computers launched by Atari - the other being the 800XL - at the summer 1983 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. It was available in the UK in quantit...

ZX Interface 2 - the new ROM cartridge and joystick interface

The Interface 2 was an update to the existing Interface 1 (formerly known as the ZX Expansion Module), a device required in tandem with the concurrently-launched Microdrive, which ...

Seiko: Where fools rush in - we made sure...

Perhaps more famous for its digital watches, Seiko had its own Business Computers line and launched this - the Series 8600 - in 1983. It ran on an 5MHz Intel 8086 CPU and came wi...

BBC Micro: Not all computers stay at home

This was one of several similar adverts for the BBC Micro which ran for a few months. They all follow a pattern of showing various things that the BBC - aka Proton - was good at, ...

Sig/Net 3: All the advantages of other dual 8 and 16 bit micros plus that vital bit more

Here's an advert for the third iteration of Chris Shelton's Sig/Net - the modular multi-user system which was launched in 1981. It also implies that dual-processor multi-user mic...

Kaypro: Our Winchesters have been winning the West

Microcomputer adverts are never shy of going with the most obvious simile or metaphor, and this one certainly does that with the placement of an actual Winchester shotgun against ...

This year will be as important to the computer industry as 1959 was to the motor industry

It's perhaps stretching it a bit to assert that the launch of another IBM clone, albeit one of the first "legitimate" clones, was as significant as the 1959 launch of Alec Issigon...

Memotech MTX: Personal and Professional

The Memotech MTX500 had been launched during the previous summer at the Earls Court Computer Fair in June 1983. It was a little unusual in that it launched with a lot of expansi...

Introducing the Atari XL Home Computers

Commodore had already run adverts for the VIC-20 with the celebrity endorsement of William Shatner and game-show host Henry Morgan in the US, and had used legendary 70s comedian R...

Grafpad - for as many uses as YOU can imagine!

British Micro was a company started by Manas Heghoyan, formerly of Hegotron Printed Circuit Boards Ltd and John Marshall, formerly of Nascom. It had been Heghoyan who bought out...

They may be smiling now, but they are about to encounter... Psyclapse and Bandersnatch

Imagine had formed when programming wunderkind Eugene Evans and two other senior staff left well-known software house Bug-Byte, which had been famous for Commodore and Sinclair ga...

Camputers: New 96 and Laureate

Published only a few months before the company went bust in the summer of 1984, this advert doesn't really say anything about why you would want to buy either of the machines - th...