Comart Advert - January 1981
From Personal Computer World
Comart Communicator: The clean simplicity outside... conceals the pedigree inside
Comart - based in St. Neots, Huntingdon - had started out in 1977 as a reseller of North Star and Cromemco micros imported from the US.
It soon started building its own third-party boards for North Star machines as these were apparently hard to source[1].
One of Comart's North Star Horizon boards - the Comart VDM display module, which included VDM *Star word processing software, so the machine could become an instant "word processor". From Practical Computing, January 1980
An advert for Comart the reseller, showing the Cromemco Z-2, which had been around since 1977. From Personal Computer World, January 1981
Before long, it was building its own entire systems, including the subject of the main advert - the CP100 Communicator, released around 1980.
The CP100 Communicator was an S-100-based system "specifically developed to suit British operating conditions and communications requirements". This included support for Prestel - the dial-up viewdata service that had been launched in 1979.
It ran CP/M - the popular operating system of the day - on a Zilog Z80 CPU. Comart was still selling the CP100 model as late as the end of 1983.
An advert for the Communicator, plus one of Comart's newer smart terminals. From a Practical Computing supplement, March 1983
Date created: 10 January 2024
Sources
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