Dynabyte Advert - February 1980

If nothing else proved the need for the likes of Commodore's Jack Tramiel or Sinclair's eponymous Clive to come along and build micros that normal people could afford to buy, it must the opening gambit of this advert:

"for less cost than a new company car your prospects can own an expandable computer system".

Not only that, but the 1980 market was still modest enough for that fact that Dynabyte had - according to the advert - shifted only 600 of these systems in the US to warrant a mention.

The Dynabyte ran CP/M on an S-100 bus with 5.25" or 8" floppy drives with a capacity starting from 650,000 "words".

This is a computer term that could be quite ambiguous and which sometimes went up to 36 bits, but which is now normally considered to be two eight-bit bytes. That would mean the 5¼" drives had a capacity of about 1.3MB. Meanwhile, the cost of a company car at the time would have been in the order of £4,000 - around £24,300 in 2024.

The Dynabyte wasn't actually anywhere near the cost of a car - company or otherwise - the advert is probably taking aim at the minicomputers of the day, which were significantly more expensive. Founder and CEO of Dynabyte Mike Watts writes:

"There were a number of configurations, but I suspect the average price out the door was around $2000 [about £9,140 in 2024], probably less. But many people loaded them up with 64k of RAM (that's all the Z80 could handle) and lots of disks, etc".

The advert was also a bit short on the number of units sold, as Mike suggests:

"[in 1980] we were probably shipping around 1000 units per month. So I don't know where they got 600. Even 6000 would have been way off - on the low side"^[1].

An earlier advert from Dynabyte's UK distributors, as featured in Personal Computer World, August 1979

Dynabyte was based in Milpitas, California, but by the late 1970s had set up a European HQ in Scarborough, UK.

It also formed a partnership with UK technology company Metrotech Management in the summer of 1981, with the combined operating launching the Metrotech Dynabyte 5000 family of business micros.

The Metrotech Dynabyte 5000 system, built as a partnership between Dynabyte of California and Metrotech Management of the UK. From Practical Computing, June 1981

One of several "computers as furniture" systems available, the modular micro was designed as a "building-block system that lets your computer grow and grow". The entry-level system came with 5¼" floppies, but could be expanded into a full multi-processor, multi-user system.

Perhaps its biggest differentiator though was that it came with the option to support in-house Viewdata - the system best-known as Ceefax and Oracle on broadcast TV, and as Prestel on dial-up.

Known as Metrotel, this was aimed at hotels, conferences or department stores where information needed to be displayed to a closed-circuit TV audience, although if that wasn't required it could also be used as an expensive Prestel terminal^[2].

Dynabyte itself was still around in 1982, when it launched its Model 5605 - still in the same basic box, but with support for eight terminals and a somewhat over-provisioned 16 printers^[3].