Transam Advert - October 1980

Another entry in the "who?" category is this advert for the "Tuscan", from little-known British computer company Transam, or actually Transam Components Ltd of Theobold Road in London.

It was yet another Z80-based system with an S-100 bus, built into something like an over-sized Commodore PET case, and was also available as a kit - perhaps surprisingly so, given that it's now 1980 and three years since the 1977 Trinity changed personal computing and introduced the concept of the ready-made complete computer.

However, in kit form it retailed for £235 - about £1,530 in 2026 - which was less than half the price of the cheapest 1981 PET.

The Transam Tuscan in its bare-board/kit form. From Practical Computing, August 1980

There was another PET connection for Transam when in July 1980 the company announced its version of Pascal for the machine.

Transam had "covered itself in further glory" by securing the contract to get Pascal on a Commodore PET, a feat which considered particularly difficult as the standard PET at the time shipped with only 32K memory^[1].

TCL Pascal was available, on floppy, for £120 - about £780 in 2026.

Transam's heritage as a components reseller is evident from this advert in April 1981's Practical Computing. It also shows that Transam has moved its north-west London address of Chapel Street into the heart of Holborn

According to the company, the Tuscan was one of the few systems around that had been designed with "its total concept in mind right from the outset^[2]".

This concept appeared to be one where you'd start with the S-100-based single-board micro, which included a Z80 CPU, no fewer than eighteen input/output ports, integral graphics, 8K of RAM, an 8K ROM and an RS232 serial port, and then build up from there.

It was a natural evolution of Transam's earlier Triton single-board computer, which had been launched in 1978 as a joint project between Transam and Electronics Today International (ETI), although the Triton had used Intel's 8080 and the Eurocard expansion format, a feature shared with Acorn's System 1.

A Transam Tuscan in use as an S-100 host to test a Viewdata card from Hi-Tech Electronics of Southampton. From Practical Computing, April 1981

The Tuscan was apparently popular, or at least common, enough to feature as the host machine for Practical Computing's test of an S-100 Teletext/Viewdata card, shipped by Hi-Tech Electronics of Southampton.

The card, which could support the BBC's Ceefax, ITV's Oracle and - with the addition of an S-100 modem - Prestel, retailed for £295 plus VAT, which is about £1,880 in 2026 money.

Adrian Boot's self portrait sitting at his Transam Tuscan, with a possibly-faked screenshot of a photo of Kate Bush. From Practical Computing, April 1981

It was also the micro of choice of famous music photographer Adrian Boot, who had previously been using Transam's 4K Triton, a kit micro which took him three days to build.

He had picked Transam partly because of the cost: his company London Features International (LFI) had spoken to IBM a few years before about computerising their photo library and had received a quote of around £15,000, which is about £120,600 in 2026.

However it was also Transam's approachability, with Boot saying about his experiences with the Triton that:

"I liked their attitude. There's a kind of snobbishness about microcomputers; if you're in the know, everything is fine and you're a member of the club. If you aren't, it's really difficult to learn anything. [Transam] answered even my most stupid questions patiently and very helpfully".

LFI ended up with a Tuscan with dual double-density floppies, 48K of RAM and a fast dot-matrix printer, all for around £4,000, or about £22,200 now.