Durango Advert - December 1982

This advert, which features a green Mekon - the alien character from British 1950s comic Dan Dare - is for one of the least computer-ey micros in the entire collection: the Durango 700, distributed in the UK by Computer Ancilliaries Limited.

It was mostly a printer with a keyboard stuck to the front, a disk unit (which included a 15mb hard drive, which was reasonably big for the time), and a small 9" monitor stuck to the side.

Known initially as the Durango F-85, the system - which weighed a hefty 65 pounds/30 kilogrammes, or more than the weight of a bag of cement - ran an Intel 8085 processor and could support four terminals connected via industry-standard RS-232 (serial) connectors.

Despite its weight, it was considered as being relatively compact, with John Scandiolos - Durango's vice-president of marketing - saying:

"What we've done is design a product that integrates the peripherals and the processing mechanisms, using the printer as the base. The resulting product has 40% of the parts of a conventional system and uses half the energy - roughly that needed by two ordinary light bulbs. From a design standpoint, the product is very significant to the industry. I think it's going to show the way for all future designs of systems requiring a printer as well as diskette storage, processor and CRT [monitor/display]. Why should you have three boxes anyway?"^[1].

The founders of Durango - George Comstock, John Scandalios and Charles Waggoner - had previously founded Diablo Systems Inc, before selling it to Xerox.

They left the famous daisy-wheel printer manuafacturer in 1976 and in August of the following year set up the new company in a garage across the road from Apple, in Cupertino.

By September 1977 the start-up had secured a $1.5 million equity investment, with a further $2.5 million being added in July 1978^[2].

After the Durango 700 and its top-of-the-range sibling, the 950 model, the company launched a successor machine, based on Intel's 80286, in an attempt to try and out-compete the new IBM PC, but the strategy failed and the company went bankrupt in 1984^[3].

There's no price displayed in this advert, but at launch in the US it retailed for $13,500 - around £43,100 in 2025 terms.

This was no doubt a significant reason why it seemed to have been destroyed by the arrival of the much cheaper IBM PC, priced at around £2,900 (£13,900 in 2025), in June of this year.