Fortronic Advert - March 1981

This advert seems to be treading somewhat risky ground with its assertion that somehow £4,000 (about £22,200 in 2026 money) is actually cheap for a micro, when something like the top-of-the-range Commodore PET was available for around a quarter of the price.

It's proof perhaps that some companies still hung on to the concept that enough people will pay over the odds on the assumption that it's much better quality - an approach which certainly worked for Apple and IBM.

The F500 featured an 8-bit Motorola 6809 (an evolution of the 6800^[1]) - the same chip which appeared in the humble Tandy Color Computer and Dragon home micros - as well as disk storage of 500K upwards.

An advert from July 1980's Practical Computing showing Fortronic's heritage as a peripherals reseller, here shown offering, amongst other things, a Tally T1612 KSR 1200 Baud Printer Terminal with 42 programmable functions at a bargain price of £1,499 plus VAT, which is around £10,600 in 2026 terms. Much like Texas Instruments' famous Silent 700, or Transdata's 300 Series, the Tally 1612 terminal had a keyboard for input and a printer for output - rather than a video display unit - giving both feedback from the machine it was connected to as well as a hard copy

Fortronic, a company based in Dunfirmline, Fife, had started out - as many microcomputer companies of the day did - as component and peripheral resellers, offering terminals from Canada's Volker-Craig, as well as products from Facet, Qume and Wang.

It ended up specialising in banking and financial terminal systems (hence the steep prices) and was bought out by banknote printers De La Rue for around £7 million in 1987^[2].

It during its De La Rue ownership that it was involved in the launch of the Switch point-of-sales Debit Card system for the UK supermarket Waitrose in 1990.

Fortronic's system had evolved from one of the very first debit card systems in a UK supermarket - a system called "Streamline" which had been trialled in Waitrose Marlow in 1986, and which had showed definite consumer interest and improved speed at the checkouts.

The Switch payment system, based upon Fortronic's F75 POS hardware, was completely separate from the till and required the total to be keyed in by the operator, with the customer physically signing a till slip that the F75 generated.

However, Waitrose's Alan Ducker predicted what was coming when he suggested:

"At some point in the future Waitrose may replace this system with an ‘intelligent’ register, a single machine which performs all these functions as well as printing cheques and having the capacity for scanning^[3]".

Fortronic would be bought out for a second time by Ingenico in 1999^[4].