RAIR Advert - August 1980

It's an enigmatic advert from an enigmatic company - RAIR - for its original Black Box microcomputer.

It looks to be in almost Cadbury branding, and in keeping with the chocolate theme also seems to allude to Rowntree's Black Magic chocolates^[1], which had the line "who knows the secrets of the Black Magic box?".

Originally released in the Autumn of 1978, the advert is showing either the original Model 1 or possibly the Model 2 - the buttons on the front differ from the Model 3 version in the Centre for Computing History, Cambridge^[2].

In any case, there's not much to go on as the advert is very light on actual information. Maybe it's one of those "teaser" adverts that implies that something new is on the way - a sometimes-risky move as it can kill off demand for any existing product.

That's an outcome often known as the Osborne Effect, although North Star should really claim that crown when around 1978 it pre-announced a new double-sided double-density floppy disk drive contoller, killing demand for its existing SSSD unit overnight and almost bankrupting the company^[3].