Zen Advert - February 1983

There's nothing quite like an advert without a photo of the thing you're selling to really promote it, although this one does at least feature a custom Rubik's cube.

That's maybe because this appears to be just another "beige box" IBM-a-like, and judging by most of the other clones being released at the time, if you've seen one you've seen 'em all.

A pre-released advert for Zen Microcomputer's mystery IBM-compatible PC, possibly also called Zen, either after a branch of Chinese Bhuddism or the ship's computer in legendary 1970s TV series Blake's 7. It shows the possibly-garbled iAPX 186/8086 microprocessor designation in the otherwise-standard specification. From Personal Computer World, December 1982

The Zen had a fairly standard spec, although it advertised its CPU as being the iAPX 186/8086^[1]. iAPX was a short-lived way that Intel used to describe its Advanced Performance Architecture - a term which didn't even work when condensed to an initialism and which apparently confused even Intel's own technical authors^[2].

It's likely referring to the relatively rare 80186, although there's an outside chance that it could be referring to the 8086 - the 16-bit-data-bus version of the 8088 that was used in the original IBM PC.

The 80186 was hardware-incompatible with the popular 8086/8088 series, and so was largely ignored by PC manufacturers who were waiting for the 80286, released in 1982.

In a pre-release advert in December 1982's Personal Computer World, Zen Microcomputers the company didn't seem to know how much it was going to sell its machine for, as it was suggesting "circa £1,400 + VAT", or around £1,610. that's about £6,840 in 2024.