Cambridge Computer Advert - August 1990

It's over three years since the launch of Clive Sinclair's Z88 portable computer, and not much has changed, except that the price is finally back to its original launch price of £199 + VAT, or around £680 in 2024 terms. In real terms, that's actually a drop of around £100 since 1987.

More than three years with an unchanged specification is like a geological epoch in computer terms, but the Z88 was obviously still selling, although actual sales figures are hard to come by.

At the start of its production run, Clive Sinclair was claiming that 1,000 Z88's a week were being produced, a figure which he expected to "soon double"^[1]. However, some research based on Z88 serial numbers suggests that a total no more than 65,000 were built^[2].

Cambridge Computer does a few Christmas bundles in an advert from December 1990's Personal Computer World

Perhaps more telling though is the relatively low-key nature of this advert compared to the earlier ones, and the fact that it appeared towards the back of the August 1990 edition of Personal Computer World.

This, and the above Christmas bundle advert, do however feature another rebrand of the company logo, and a new strapline - "The computer for people on the move".

Also, in much the same way as Commodore kept the 64 selling - perhaps beyond its sell-by date - the Z88 is now being sold in a bundle, with the computer, a carry case, a set of batteries and a 32K EPROM pack and eraser.

The Z88 had no internal storage, and so EPROM - Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory - was the only way to store data beyond a power-off.