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 100 micro throughout Europe, including its UK dealer - Equinox Computer Systems Ltd.

The Equinox 100, which had been built around George Morrow's WünderBuss - an improved S-100 backplane - didn't sell particularly well^[1] and the company switched over to producing upgrades for Tandy's TRS-80.

However, the improvements that Morrow had helped make to the S-100 bus found their way into the IEEE S-100 standard^[2] which was ratified in 1983 - albeit too late to do much against the onslaught of the IBM PC.

Meanwhile, Parasitic's UK offshoot seems to have dropped both the original Equinox and anything to do with the parent company's new direction, and so is selling the Series 5000 micro built by Industrial Micro Systems instead.

It looks like it had been diversifying for quite a while as it had been selling other companies' micros, for example the North Star Horizon, at least as far back as November 1978.

Equinox sells the North Star Horizon. 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, 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 £10,300 in 2024. 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 £20,500 now.