Rade Systems Advert - February 1982

Even though Rade Systems of Ballards Lane in north London ran this advert for at least a year - despite being full of grocer's apostrophes - the company itself is another of those that has managed to leave virtually no trace.

The machines advertised are yet another Z80A system with 64K RAM.

They used Western Digital's 1397 chip set to support double-sided double-density disk storage in IBM's 3740 format and, slightly unusually, also provided 2K of character-generator RAM, which enabled custom character sets to be generated.

Designed and engineered in the UK, apparently, the Rader 1000 - with dual 5¼" floppies - and the Rader 2000 - with dual 8" drives - might have been aimed towards the laboratory or scientific market, as the company was planning to ship 8-bit digital-analogue (or vice-versa) converters as plug-in boards.

It also claimed "sufficient room for 12 or more dual port expansion boards", although it looked to be a proprietary bus rather than the S-100 format common at the time - that's assuming that these systems were based on the company's own Rader One single-board micro.

Rade Systems Ltd's Rader One single-board computer, featuring eight fifty-way expansion sockets, a Z80A, 2K of video RAM and 2K of character RAM, plus a Western Digital 1797 floppy disk controller, for £350 plus VAT, or around £1,980 in 2026.

The Rader 1000 retailed for £1,480, probably plus VAT, which would be around £8,430 in 2026, whilst the Rader 2000 cost £1,980, or about £11,200 now.