Equinox/Parasitic Advert - January 1981

Parasitic Engineering of Albany, California, would go bust in 1983, but prior to that it had established a network of resellers for its Equinox micros throughout Europe.

This included its UK dealer - Equinox Computer Systems Ltd - which had been set up in July 1978^[1], shortly after the Equinox micro itself had been launched in the UK at the Mini-Micro exhibition, held at the US Government Trade Centre in London.

However, Equinox UK didn't just re-sell Parasitic's micro of the same name, as its first two products also included North Star's Horizon, as well as the Equinox 100.

In the autumn of 1979 it added IMS International's 5000 and 8000 systems to its roster, with the Equinox 200 being added in the summer of 1980.

Parasitic didn't appear to have released an Equinox 200 - or the 300 as reviewed in May 1981's Practical Computing - and so it's possible that Equinox UK was by this time branding other OEM hardware whilst keeping the branding.

The original Parasitic Equinox 100, which had been built around George Morrow's WünderBuss - an improved S-100 backplane - didn't sell particularly well^[2] and the company eventually switched over to producing upgrades for Tandy's TRS-80.

However, the improvements that Morrow and Parasitic's co-founder Howard Fullmer had made to the S-100 bus found their way into the IEEE S-100 standard^[3] which was ratified in 1983 - albeit too late to do much against the onslaught of the IBM PC.

Meanwhile, by the time of this advert, Equinox UK has dropped both the original Equinox and anything to do with the Parasitic's new direction, and so is now selling the Series 5000 micro built by Industrial Micro Systems instead.

Equinox had also been selling the North Star Horizon since its inception in 1978. From Practical Computing, November 1978

The Industrial Micro Systems Series 5000 was one of several systems around at the time that seem to ignore the fact that computers are general-purpose devices and was instead pitched solely as a Word Processor system, running the famous WordStar package, along with Mail-Merge and DataStar.

It was otherwise a standard Z80A-based micro on an S-100 bus, with 12 slots. The advert also suggests that it used 5" floppy disks, however there was no such format so it would have been 5¼" minifloppies. Also available were 8" disk units if a bit more storage was required.

The price of the Series 5000, with 64K RAM and the various software packages, was £1,995, or about £11,000 in 2026. However, to make it a full system you would also need the Televideo 912C terminal at £595 and maybe the NEC SpinWriter daisy-wheel printer, a snip at £1,850. That would be a total of £4,440, or £22,000 now.