Hotel Microsystems Advert - April 1985

This advert, from July 1985's Practical Computing, announces the new Minstrel 2 from HM Systems, formerly known as Hotel Microsystems.

Released less than a year after HM's Minstrel 68K and the Minstrel Turbo, the advert doesn't directly mention what the new Minstrel 2 is running, other than it now offers HTS 86 dual-processor cards, in the old sense as in actually having two CPUs on each board.

Possibly based on Intel's 8086 or even 80186, the Minstrel 2 appeared to support up to 12 users, hosting multiple cards on its S-100 bus, and even allowed IBM PCs to connect to it over ARCnet.

Another advert for the Minstrel 2, very much harking back to Commodore's desert island advert of 1981. From Practical Computing, April 1985

The Minstrel 2, with support for two users and a 20MB hard disk, retailed for £6,250 - or about £25,100 in 2026 - with additional workstations at £1,110 (£4,460).

A few months later, HM Systems announced its separate ARCNet cards for either IBM PCs or Apricot machines, with the card for the latter somehow managing to be less than half the size of that for the IBM.

An advert for HM Systems' two ARCNet cards - one giant one for the IBM, and one half the size for Apricot's new PC. From Practical Computing, July 1985

Prices for the new system, including the Minstrel 2 "server" and twelve Apricot users were now £11,775 (£47,300), with an additional £410 (£1,640) per card for each extra user.

For a while, prices like these were justified as whilst initial costs were high, price per extra user was sufficiently less than purchasing a new PC every time, especially if each additional PC had hard disk space and needed a printer.

Unfortunately for HM and its competition of the day, like Bromcom, Altos or Jarogate, commoditisation of PCs and falling costs for hard disks and networking, eventually meant the end of most multi-user systems like this.