RAIR Advert - March 1981
From Practical Computing
RAIR: Black Box III Microcomputer solutions
Nearly nine years before the band Black Box released chart-topping track "Ride on Time", The other "Black Box" from RAIR was released.
Based on Intel's 8085, and later 8088 CPUs, and with an impressive 200MB of disk access and capable of supporting 16 users, apparently the only thing micro about it was the price - although it's obviously not cheap enough to actually put that in the advert.
The internals of the Black Box were also licenced to British computer behemoth ICL, and became part of the ICL Personal Computer - Personal Computer News commenting on the latter in 1983 that it was "a RAIR Black Box by any other name"[1].
At the end of 1981, RAIR became on of the first computer companies to offer new high-speed dynamic (DRAM) 64Kbit memory chips as an upgrade, when it offered a 256K board for the Black Box at the bargain price of £1,250.
That's around £6,710 in 2025, or £120 million per gigabyte.
Date created: 23 November 2013
Last updated: 11 December 2024
Sources
Text and otherwise-uncredited photos © nosher.net 2025. Dollar/GBP conversions, where used, assume $1.50 to £1. "Now" prices are calculated dynamically using average RPI per year.
