Hawk Advert - December 1982

Hawk Computers had been around since at least 1978^[1] but seemed to have been fairly invisible, with this being one of only a few adverts appearing in Practical Computing towards the end of 1982.

The company appeared to have always had a particular focus on reliability and integrity of data, with this particular machine - the Hawk 1210 - being supplied with several unusual features.

These included a three-way key switch "to prevent unathorised access", a reset buzzer for some reason, continuously-running background diagnostics and, more usefully, an interlock which prevent the machine from being powered down whilst a disk was loaded, a feature which prevented accidental corruption of data.

It was also constructed with a strong metal case and came with an improved switched-mode power supply, which apparently catered for the "dirty and variable mains often found in industrial environments".

Otherwise, it was a reasonably normal "perfectly adequate" 4MHz Z80-based CP/M 2.2 machine - or Z 8 øA as the advert would have it - albeit with a minimum of 66K memory, possibly providing an extra 2K above the usual 64K, just for video memory.

The advert also shows, as well as a broken bird's egg, the cardboard "floppy disk" - used to protect the disk heads during shipping - still in the disk drive, with its "remove before use" tab still sticking out.

Hawk's 6480 single-board computer, from Practical Computing, November 1982

Hawk had surfaced the month before with an advert for its Hawk 6480 Single Board Computer - a 30cm by 30cm square computer board running a 4MHz Z80A processor and featuring everything needed to build a complete micro, including serial ports, a parallel printer port, floppy and hard-disk controller interfaces, and 64K of on-board RAM.

There's no bus on the board, so it wouldn't be expandable - other than with custom EPROMs or by using the "prototyping area" - and so perhaps might have been aimed at the "smart terminal" OEM market which was quite popular at the time.

Boards like this could be crammed into a terminal or even floppy-disk case, along with a floppy or two and maybe a hard disk, in order to create a complete "micro" for very little additional investment - an approach used in products like Zytek's McCombo.

The Hawk 6480 retailed for £420, which is about £2,380 in 2026