Iotec Advert - March 1983

Winner of the award for most puzzling advertising campaign must surely go to Iotec, which for the best part of a year seemed to feature adverts all in black with just the word "iotec" on them, or with the word "iotec" and a pile of snow for a bit of a change around Christmas.

There was seldom anything else on the advert, until this one, featuring a dodgily-added small photo of the machines plus some technical details.

And you'd think that a Public Limited Company would have left some trace behind, but IO Technology PLC seems to be another micro computer company that has disappeared completely.

IO Technology PLC, or Iotec's, Christmas advert, featuring the slightly odd "the microcomputer is a Santa Claus machine that will speed up the world's productivity. And end the recession forever". From Practical Computing, December 1982

Much like the company, there's not much to go on about the computer itself, but the Iona appeared to be a Z80 or 8080 with a slightly peculiar ration of 75K RAM.

It ran CP/M, had two 400K 5.25" floppy disk drives and shipped with cBASIC, and it's possible that the odd memory allocation meant it was one of a handful of micros shipping around the time, like the PBM-1000, that had found a way of moving CP/M out of the way of user memory.

All the usual office-systems guff was available - stock control, invoicing, general accounts and so on - as a "freebie".

Perhaps that's why the price isn't mentioned anywhere.