Nascom/Lucas Advert - January 1980

1980 was perhaps the year of the rise of the printer, but at the time these were still very much in the realms of "expensive" - much like floppy disk drives before them, where the peripheral cost more than the computer it was attached to.

Nascom's serial Imp printer - one of the first affordable "small" printers to reach the market^[1] - was at the cheaper end of the scale, coming in at about £375 including VAT, or about £2,280 in 2024 money. This compared, perhaps unfavourably, to the price of the Nascom-1 to which it could attach - available for only £160 (£970) - or even the newer Nascom-2, which was £340.

The IMP printer featured in the Nascom System 80 bundle, which included an actual fibre-glass housing which could take the Nascom board as well as four expansion cards. A fully-specced system with printer, 48K RAM, his-res colour card, 5¼" floppy disk drive, Nascom 2 microprocessor board and extra ROM firmware came in at £1,991, or about £12,100 in 2024. You'd still need to buy a monitor to go with it.

Elsewhere in the same edition of Personal Computer World that this advert appeared in, Parameterised Computer Systems was offering an otherwise standard (albeit with an IEEE interface) dot-matrix printer for the more business-oriented Commodore PET for £550 - an eye-watering £3,350 in 2024^[2]. Compared to that, the price for the Nascom printer was a complete bargain as it had the added bonus of being already built.