North Star Advert - January 1978

A simple advert for North Star's range of S-100 boards - designed for its own Horizon micro, but compatible with any other S-100 micro running Intel's 8080 or the Zilog Z80 processor.

The range included a 16K RAM board which could work at the Z80's full clock speed with no wait states. This retailed for $549, or about £2,770 in 2024 - that's £170 million per gigabyte.

The "micro disk system" was even more expensive, at $799, or £3,990 now. This at least included the S-100 interface board, a Shugart 5¼" floppy unit, a disk operating system and BASIC on a floppy.

There was also a Z80A processor board - the faster 4MHz version of the Z80, and a "hardware floating point" board. In the world of the IBM PC, this sort of thing would come to be known as a Maths Co-processor.

Here, it gave access to much higher precision numbers and faster calculations - apparently 50 times faster than numeric calculations performed natively on the 8080 CPU itself. It was a bargain at $359 assembled - about £1,790 now.