Casu Electronics Advert - June 1984

Once mentioned in Parliament^[1] as one of only two British computer manufacturers on the government's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency list of approved suppliers to have also been members of the British Microcomputer Manufacturers Group - the other being Comart - Casu seemed to specialise in compact desktop microcomputers, with models including the Mini C and this, the Micro PX.

Based in Uxbridge, Middlesex, the company's unusual name was said to have been formed from the first names of the founder's daughters - Caroline and Suzanne^[2].

It was also another of those companies that despite building micros with components which mostly came from the Far East or the US, liked to claim its computers as being all-British.

This particular claim was questioned on the letters page in November 1984's Practical Computing by Roger Sinden of Country Computers Ltd, who pointed out that it used an American-designed Slicer motherboard, and that other components like its disk drives, controllers, keyboards, etc, were probably non-British too^[3].

The Micro PX, measuring only 30 centimeters square, was based on a 6MHz Intel iAPX 186, otherwise known as the 80186 - a processor that wasn't hugely popular as it wasn't motherboard-compatible with the rest of Intel's x86 line, although that didn't stop Practical Computing from calling it "the chip to have"^[4] in its June 1984 issue.

Casu's compact micro shipped with 256K of RAM, 3½" floppy drives formatted to 737K, and Concurrent CP/M 3.1, which by now had been renamed as Concurrent DOS version 4 in an effort to distance itself from its 1970s legacy.

The single-disk version of the micro retailed for £1,650, or about £6,970 in 2026, with the 20M Rodime Winchester system going out for £3,450 - that's a hefty £14,500 now.