Comart Advert - August 1986

Comart was another member of a small group of companies that survived from the 1970s and through the era of the IBM PC, although it wasn't entirely unscathed as it had been bought by Kode International in around 1984 and was then sold again in 1990^[1]

It had started as a reseller of North Star and Cromemco micros which it imported from the US, before it started buildings its own North Star-compatible plug-in cards.

It wasn't much of a step to building its own micros, which it did around 1980, launching the Comart Communicator - a Z80 CP/M machine with an S-100 bus which it was selling through until around 1983.

Here, it's selling a new machine - the Comart Quad - which was derived from an earlier computer, the Comart Workstation. It's one of relatively few machines to use Intel's 80186 CPU, which ran at 10MHz, and like many of Comart's earlier machines was a multi-user system.

Instead of running on a local area network (although it could also do that) it supported up to four users connected via terminals, even though affordable IBM-style PCs and networks were rapidly making this setup irrelevant.

The IBM AT computer could theoretically support up to 16 users in this fashion, thanks to the 80286 CPU's protected mode memory management, but with cheap clone PCs approaching the price of decent terminals, there wasn't much point.

A Comart Quad with the main "server" and four terminals retailed for £4,995 + VAT, or around £20,900 in 2024 terms. That's £1,436 per user, which doesn't compare too well to Amstrad's PC1512, launched only a few months later than this advert and where even the expensive hard-disk version was only £920 (£3,240 in 2024).

Still, there's a certain respect for the Quad, which a review in January 1987's Practical Computing said had a "generally reassuring feel to it^[2]", in the way it could be hauled out of the box, plugged in, turned on and would be working straight away.