Compucolor Corporation Advert - July 1977

The Compucolor 8001 was an Intel 8080-based personal computer which upped the ante compared to other machines like the Cromemco and the IMSAI 8080 by having a real keyboard, 34 I/O ports and a colour display, when most other machines had this as only an optional extra. It was the first home or personal computer to offer built-in colour graphics^[1].

It retailed for $2,750, or about £16,500 in 2025 terms.

It's also curious for what appears to be a fairly unique feature in having "continuous tape memory". This was a mass-storage device which stashed up to 1MB of data on to a continuous-loop 8-track tape - the chunky cartridge-style tapes popular in cars before being usurped by compact cassettes.

This was a generous amount in 1977, although high-density double-sided 8" floppies were offering capacities of a similar range.

The Floppy Tape Memory system wasn't especially successful though, with apparently only 25 being sold.

The follow-up machine - the Compucolor II, referred to by Compucolor Corporation as its "renaissance machine" - was released in 1978, making its way to the UK in the early summer of 1979 where one of the first machines to be imported by reseller Abacus was reviewed in June 1979's Practical Computing.

It was smaller and cheaper, and had by now switched to Shugart's new minifloppy 5¼" disks. Unfortunately, Compucolor's implementation only had a formatted capacity of a puny 51.2K per disk, considerably less than the 160K sometimes available elsewhere.

Practical Computing's reviewer, Martin Collins, was used to having machines lying around for testing, but said of the Compucolor II that:

"[it] proved to be very different. It was the first computer I had used which offered interactive colour graphics, and they frankly are stunning. As it is complete with colour display, minifloppy disk drive, BASIC and filing system in ROM, it offers considerably more than most micro systems. [My children] were so enthusiastic about the Compucolor that they almost forgot to watch Worzel Gummidge on Sunday afternoon as they were trying to break the bank on the one-armed bandit. Praise indeed"

The review concluded:

"We would like a Compucolor. It is an upmarket home computer or a very small business system but it has no pretensions to being anything else^[2]".