PBM Advert - February 1982

Technically, the PBM-1000 is yet another standard business micro, what with its Z80A processor, 80K RAM, 5¼" floppy disk drives and CP/M.

Possibly designed by IMSAI 8080 co-designer Joe Killian^[1], it was built in California by Performance Business Machines, which had been set up in June 1981 as an ofshoot of the software house MicroPro, and which by the latter half of that year had around $6 million - about £22 million in 2026 - of orders from distributors in the UK, France, West Germany, Australia, Japan and Mexico.

Its claim to performance comes partly from its more-generous-than-usual 80K of RAM, which enabled CP/M and a dedicated input/output buffer to be partitioned off in a separate 16K area of memory, leaving nearly 64K available to the end user.

It also contained a second Z80 just to handle disc I/O, freeing up the main CPU to handle user tasks.

In the US, the company hoped to establish 40 or 50 regional distributors by the end of the year, with PBM's vice president of marketing and sales Larry Strober acknowledging that:

"In the beginning the main interest in the product was overseas^[2]".

However. as the advert says, "a microcomputer to the user is the software" and it was software that was this machine's "killer app", thanks to its MicroPro connections.

That's because MicroPro was the publisher of the early word processor WordStar, a package which Byte magazine, in its May 1983 issue, called "without a doubt the best-known and probably the most widely used personal computer word-processing program".

By 1984, MicroPro was considered to be the world's largest microcomputer software company, with over 20% of the word processor market.

As well as WordStar, DataStar and presumably all the other *Star sofware from MicroPro, the PBM-1000 also shipped in the UK with a financial suite - purchase ledge, sales legers, etc, from the less-internationally-known but still apparently popular company Graham-Dorian Software, as also found on the Onyx C8000.

As Computing Today pointed out:

"Probably the most successful way to attempt a break-in to the small business market is to ensure that the computer you supply is backed with sufficient software^[3]"

The PBM-1000, which it was hoped would be built in the UK at some point in time, retailed for about £6,000 - or around £33,300 in 2026 - although that included a hard disk, floppy drive, VDU/terminal and printer.

It was imported into the UK by Terodec of Reading, in Berkshire. Terodec appeared to be liquidated in 1983^[4].

Meanwhile, MicroPro would end up faltering against new word processors from WordPerfect and Microsoft, however it lived on into 1989, at which point it renamed itself WordStar, before merging with Toronto-based SoftKey Software Produces Inc in 1993^[5].