Heathkit Advert - April 1978
From Byte - The Small Systems Journal
A computer can get awfully bored when it can't communicate!
Heathkit was another of those companies better known for its consumer and technical electronics, but which jumped in to the market opened up by the MITS Altair 8800.
This advert is actually for a couple of peripherals: the base system was the Heathkit H8, but it was fairly useless without a means of input and storage, hence this advert for the H9 Video Terminal and the H10 Paper Tape Reader.
The latter is interesting in its own right as it seems to be the latest reference to the continued use of paper tape as a storage mechanism at this point in the development of computers - everything else was already using 5.25" or 8" floppies.
Perhaps it's the price - at $350 (or about £1,620 in 2024 money) it was cheap compared to a thousand-dollar floppy unit.
Heath - the company behind Heathkit and which was owned by Schlumberger - was taken over in January 1980 by Zenith Radio[1].
Schlumberger itself had only just acquired legendary U.S. chip manufacturer Fairchild - the company that spawned AMD, Intel, and a host of other "Fairchildren".
Following the acquisition, Zenith continued to sell Heath's H100 computer, re-branded as the Zenith Data Sytems' Z-100
Sources
Text and otherwise-uncredited photos © nosher.net 2024. Dollar/GBP conversions, where used, assume $1.50 to £1. "Now" prices are calculated dynamically using average RPI per year.
