Hotel Microsystems Advert - September 1982

With an odd mixture of tech and Monty Python visuals, here's an advert from Hotel Microsystems, the company that would become HM Systems, which clearly hints at HM's change of direction which would lead to it launching its own Minstrel machine in about six months' time.

The year before, HM was in the business of importing upgrade kits for the North Star Horizon, as well as the new-ish 5MB and 10MB 5¼" Winchester drives - or "mini Winnies" as Practical Computing liked to call them - plus some S-100 power-supply cards to go with it.

Now, it's stocking actual North Star computers, including the Horizon and the newer Advantage, and is functioning as a value-added reseller, in that it is offering its own "S-100 systems, all based on the North Star Horizon".

Many companies of the day - like Comart or even North Star itself - followed the same path, starting with selling or building add-in cards, or other companies' micros, before cutting out the middle-man and building their own micro.

Hotel Microsystems was also selling single-board plug-in Z80 processor boards from which to build multi-user systems, where each pair of users had their own "micro" on the S-100 bus in the host machine and connected to it with a terminal over a serial cable.

The Horizon had enough spare slots to allow up to eight users to connect in this way, all sharing whatever disk storage and printers the host machine provided, which would be running TurboDOS rather than the standard CP/M.

HM's cards retailed for £395, probably plus VAT, which is around £2,230 in 2026.

That was relatively cheap for an entire "computer", although the price of a terminal to access it was probably at least the same again.