ITT Advert - July 1982

When Apple had been a "new struggling company with few resources and [ITT] was a big consumer group with manufacturing and marketing ability in Europe", ITT had secured the gig to manufacture the Apple II under licence and sell it as the ITT 2020 in Europe, a deal which lasted for as long as the supply of Apple motherboards that the company have given ITT to build around. When this supply ran out, Apple, by now able to open its own factory in the Republic of Ireland, announced to ITT's surprise that it was no longer required^[1].

ITT's follow-up therefore had nothing to do with the Apple but was instead a fairly standard Z80-based system, albeit one which was planned to be upgradable to Intel's forthcoming 16-bit 8086, which the company hoped might position it in the IBM PC market, despite the price being even higher than IBM's none-too-cheap 5150. The 5150 (IBM PC) wasn't yet officially available in the UK, but was being imported and sold as a package with software and a voltage converter kit by Mick Punter of Microcomputerland. ITT meanwhile was relying on its reliability as a selling point, but as Guy Kewney pointed out in Personal Computer World, "reliability up to the standard of Japanese-built micros like the Sord or the Sharp would give ITT a good chance in an important sector of the market. But [that] reliability comes at a price"^[2].