Sharp Advert - October 1980

This advert from Sharp continues the company's long-running theme which implies some sort of extra-terrestrial origin for its computer.

This particular micro, which had actually been around since October 1979, where it had been launched at the Birmingham International Business Show^[1], was Zilog Z80-based and had about 32K of available memory.

Unusually, if you wanted to program in anything other than Assembler or machine code, you had to load your program of choice (BASIC, Fortran, etc) from cassette.

It also had an awkward non-standard keyboard and, like the Commodore PET of 1977, could only natively draw in-built characters^[2]. By the end of 1981, it was retailing for £530 - about £2,730 in 2024 terms.

Sharp was particularly strict about the dealers it would allow to resell its machine, in an era which was somewhat notorious for the "sell and forget" sort of attitude where after-sales support was often non-existant.

Writing in the December 1979 issue of Personal Computer World, Guy Kewney mentioned letters from suppliers referring to rivals who outright refuse to provide service, others who would lie about competitors' service charges, or even that competitors would not be able to provide any sort of after-sales service or support^[3].

Sharp's Paul Streeter said that "we feel that a lot of the problems in this industry in the last 18 months have been due to suppliers who have appointed distributors without checking their ability to back up the equipment". Sharp was also said to be insisting on software back-up skills as well as hardware maintenance ability.

The MZ-80K - formerly just the MZ-80. From Personal Computer World, February 1982

By the end of 1979, having turned down several applications, Sharp had only appointed one dealer - HB Computers of Kettering in Northamptonshire^[4].

The MZ-80 was still going in at least 1982, where it had been re-branded as the MZ-80K, following the launch of MZ-80B business version.