Equinox/Parasitic Advert - October 1986

From the days before "Power Point" meant something other than slideshow presentations in tedious meetings on a Friday afternoon, comes this advert from Equinox for its latest multi-user system.

The company itself appears to have started out as the UK importer of California-based Parasitic Engineering's various 8080 or Z80 based Equinox microcomputers.

However by 1981 it seems to have gone off on its own, even keeping the logo of the original imported machines as part of its corporate identity, although it had been updated slightly by the time of this advert.

In any event, Parasitic itself went bust in 1983, and by 1986 the UK company had moved away from the old S-100/Z80 architecture into multi-user systems based upon Intel's 80186.

This particular processor was never used as widely as Intel's other processors - the 8088 and 8086 before it or the 80286 afterwards - as it came with embedded versions of some of the features that the IBM PC world required external support chips for, thus making it somewhat incompatible with the wider IBM ecosystem.

The file server on offer, as well as its own 80186 CPU, looked like it also supported additional 80186 or Z80H CPUs for each additional user, who would connect using the terminals shown in the advert. There was also the option to support 1MB of memory and even dedicated maths co-processors per user, making a fully-specced machine both powerful but also probably impressively expensive.