Cromemco Advert - August 1979

With a 4MHz Z-80A CPU and an expansive 21 card slots, the System 3 was particulary impressive in being able to address 16MB of memory - a fairly fantastical amount in 1979, where 4-32K was the normal order of the day.

The advert also nicely shows off the prevailing fashion in 70s and 80s adverts: the use of low-cut dresses and boobs to sell computers.

The price of the system was £3,293 - an snip at about £21,200 in 2024 terms, with an additional hard-disk sub-system - the HDD-11 - available for £5,025 (£32,300).

Also check out the handy-sized 8" floppy disks in use - these were Persci's Model 277 drives and used IBM 3740 formatting to give 1.9MB per disc.

The system as a whole reviewed quite well - Sue Eisenbach wrote in October 1979's Personal Computer World that

"there is nothing gimmicky about the hardware or software. The hardware is solid; the operating system is more extensive than CP/M; the supporting software is reliable, comprehensive and well documented"^[1].

Unusually, Cromemco was one of relatively few companies not to use Microsoft's de-facto standard BASIC.

One advantage of this was that Cromemco's BASIC pre-compiled each line into machine code as it was entered, which saved on storage and made programs much faster to run.

A couple of months earlier, the first 64K memory card for Cromemco systems had been debuted in the UK by Edinburgh-based distributor MicroCentre.

The card cost £1,100 including VAT - around £7,080 in 2024 money, which actually represented a saving of 43% over the previous 4 x 16K cards^[2].

That's still about £115 million per gigabyte in 2023 prices, although that was a drop from about £185 million per gigabyte in 1975.