Micro 8 Advert - January 1982

Micro 8 Ltd, of Basingstoke, Hampshire, appears to be a company set up specifically to sell the micro of the same name.

Except that it's not Micro 8's micro, but was actually built by Fujitsu - and later Casio - of Japan, where it was generally known as the FM-8, or Fujitsu Micro 8.

In a departure from the run-of-the-mill Z80 processor that most business micros of the day used, the Micro 8 ran on a Motorola 68A09 - the slightly faster 1.2MHz version of the 6809 - as well as running a regular 6809, presumably to manage input/output.

And whilst the FM-8 in Japan also offered a Z80 as a plug-in board option, it appears as if Micro 8 - the company - was shipping it pre-bundled in its UK offering, making it effectively a three-processor machine, but importantly offering the all-important CP/M compatibility which was virtually a requirement at the time.

As well as the standard CP/M-friendly 64K, the M-8 also came with a generous 48K of video RAM, which gave it the ability to mix low and high-resolution video at the same time.

Micro-8 was also offering "future expansion" which included a bubble-memory module, making Fujitsu an early adopter of the short-lived non-volatile memory format.

It retailed for £995 plus VAT, which is around £5,670 in 2026, with a 14" green-screen monitor available for an extra £180 plus VAT, or £1,020 now.