Morrow Designs Advert - February 1983

George Morrow had started making products for microcomputers in 1976, having joined the influential Homebrew Computer Club which had formed in the wake of the launch of the Altair 8800 at the very beginning of 1975.

Morrow's early products included add-ons for both the Altair and the IMSAI 8080 - effectively a clone of the Altair - as well as a successful 4K memory module, which he sold to Bill Godbout, another famous name from the early homebrew scene.

Morrow's company went through several names including Thinker Toys, until legal action from CBS sub-division Tinker Toys caused a change of name to Morrow Designs.

One of its first products was the Equinox 100, a machine sold through Parasitic Engineering, however it failed to sell that well as it was based on Intel's 8080 processor at a time when Zilog's Z80 was becoming far more popular for small business micros.

The company went on to launch the Decision 1 micro in 1981, before releasing the Micro Decision series in 1982.

On the face of it it was just another Z80 micro, although it was pitched as a particularly-affordable machine^[1], with its fanless single-board design and lack of keyboard and video interface contributing to its budget price.

And if you believe that micro companies were paying the full retail price for the software that they bundled, then the company was actually paying the purchaser thanks to the claimed £1,000 worth of software included with the machine, which only cost £895 plus VAT - or about £4,700 in 2026 - for the single-drive version.

However, that was just for the computer itself - it also required a terminal of some sort in order to do anything useful, although with its two RS232C sockets it was possible to connect two at a time, making it a very affordable multi-user system.

Morrow Designs even released a hard-disk interface for the MD which was said to make it the cheapest hard-disk CP/M machine available anywhere^[2].

The Micro Decision's reseller in the UK - Interam - was also offering a bundle including a dumb terminal, which provided the necessary screen and a keyboard, the micro itself, and an Interam-branded printer for £2,295, or about £12,000 now.

That's significantly cheaper than the equivalent IBM PC price, which including a printer would be somewhere north of £4,000, or £18,200 now.

Morrow's final product was the lunch-box-shaped Pivot Portable, which it had also licenced to Zenith Data Systems.

Unfortunately, just as Morrow was going through some financial difficulties, it lost a huge potential contract with the US government to Zenith, which beat it with Zenith's version of the Pivot.

Morrow Designs went bankrupt shortly afterwards.