Comart Advert - December 1984

This is another entry in the IBM-alike pantheon, from one of several companies of the time that started out as re-sellers or importers.

Comart had been importing systems from companies like North Star and Cromemco since 1977, before producing its own North Star-compatible cards and board, as these were hard to find in the UK.

It eventually moved in to the inevitable IBM clone market where pretty much every business machine was by this time in 1984. At some point in-between, it had been bought by Kode International microcomputer group.

Other companies that trod a similar path include ACT, which had previously imported Chuck Peddle's Sirius 1 (sold as the Victor 9000 in the US), before releasing its own Apricot range, and Almarc, which had been the only UK reseller of Vector Graphics machines, before basing its own Series 8 on the Vector 4 and dropping the original.

The advert is primarily for Comart's CP2000 Intel 80286-based multi-user system, which could support up to four simultaneous programs and 12 users - all connected using WY50 (likely re-branded Wyse) terminals running on a twisted-pair local area network.

Also available was the Comart Workstation, in either dual floppy or 10Mb hard-disk variants. These were unusual in that they ran on Intel's 80186 CPU - a chip which was released in 1982 but didn't see much take-up because it was incompatible with the support chips used by regular 8088-based IBM PCs and their clones.

The main advert features a particularly nice 1980s office illustration as part of the complex eight-page gate-fold insert that was bound in to the magazine, whilst the advert above shows the company's older - but still going - Communicator, first launched in 1980.

The Communicator was by this time available in now fewer than 20 different configurations and supported an extensive set of operatings systems: CP/M, MP/M, MS-DOS, CP/NOS, CP/NET and BOS - the Business Operating System.

It also supported IBM and ICL mainframe protocols, as well as having support for viewdata services like Prestel, and could do Telex capture. The advert even claims that - possibly thanks to its government CCTA (Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency) compliance - it was in use as a "military system".