Equinox/Parasitic Advert - June 1982

Equinox UK appeared to get its start as a reseller of Parasitic Engineering of California's Equinox 100 micro, at least to the extent that the UK company and the original micro shared the same logo.

However, before long, Equinox UK appeared to abandon its founding machine before branching out into reselling various OEM machines under the Equinox label, including a 200 and a 300 model, and then ditching the Equinox label entirely with its Series 5000 range of 1981, built by Industrial Micro Systems.

In the following year, Equinox - which by this time was also selling third-party systems in their own right, such as the Osborne 1 - launched its Episode compact computer.

Given the slightly odd name, this is highly likely to have been based upon the Episode micro as built by Epic Computer Products of Fountain Valley in California^[1].

It was a small form-factor Z80A-based micro and shipped with two RS232C-compatible serial ports, meaning that regular mainframe terminals could be plugged in, as well as two 5¼" floppy disk drives for a total of 1.5MB storage.

Practical Computing said of it in its April 1982 edition that:

"The Episode is a microcomputer with "micro" dimensions - it occupies about as much deskspace as a sheet of foolscap paper. Even so it is a powerful stand-alone system based on the Z-80A processor running at 4MHz. The Episode is capable of running CP/M packages markedly faster than other systems^[2]."

Given that it was otherwise a fairly standard CP/M micro with a normal Z80 of the time, the fact that it was "markedly faster" than other systems probably implies that it was one of the new wave of micros which were making use of Direct Memory Access.

DMA was a system whereby data from the disk drive could be fetched or written directly in and out of memory, rather than going via the CPU, and was also used on fast CP/M machines such as the PBM 1000 or the LSI System M4.

It was also one of several micros around at the time which were squeezing into ever-smaller footprints, often by using a small single-board computer (SBC) shoved into a small case - sometimes not much bigger than the two floppies these sorts of micros came with.

As such it was not unlike Zytek's McCombo, which was based upon an SBC built by Discom of Evesham, which was first announced around March of 1982.

The Equinox Episode retailed for £1,995 plus VAT, which is around £11,400 in 2026 money.