Digital Group Advert - August 1977
From Byte - The Small Systems Journal
32K. One card. One low price. Only from The Digital Group
The Digital Group was entirely unrelated to the other Digital - Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC - but was founded in Denver, Colorado, in 1974. It went bust only five years later, thanks to supply and management issues, despite having thousands of unfulfilled orders on its books.
The Digital Group's "System" micros were sometimes called the Cadillac of the computer world, as they offered nice features like a built-in operating system and fast tape interfaces. It was launched in 1975 at a time when other computers such as the Altair 8800 required lengthy programming with switches and lights before even getting to the point where a tape could be loaded.
The company's later Z80 computer was the first to offer the popular microprocessor chip of the same name[1].
The memory board in the advert appears to be non-standard, so would only have been suitable for The Digital Group's own computers. It retailed for $995 - about £5,810 in 2024. That's around £190 million a gigabyte.
Date created: 18 December 2023
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.
