Processor Technology Advert - August 1977
From Byte - The Small Systems Journal
One Sol-20 equals three computers.
Here's another advert for Processor Technology's Sol-20 - the microcomputer designed by Lee Felsenstein in 1976.
It's offering the Sol-20 in three bundles - the Sol System I, II and III. The cheapest bundle - System I - came with the Sol-20 with a "SOLOS personality module", an 8192 word memory (which assuming two-byte words equals 16K RAM) a 12" monitor, tape deck and a cassette copy of BASIC.
It retailed for $2,129 fully assembled and burned in - about £12,300 in 2024.
The top-of-the-range System III came with a total of 64K RAM, the Helios II "disk memory system", which was a unit with two PerSci Model 270 disk drives[1], and BASIC on disk rather than cassette.
It was over twice the price, retailing at $5,450, which is a fairly hefty £31,500 in 2024.
Clive Sinclair - of ZX Spectrum fame - would probably have appreciated the Sol-20.
He was famous for his obsession with design "elegance", a view which some took to mean producing things as simply and cheaply as possible, but which did lead to impressive feats like the ZX81 - a small computer which had a chip count of only four.
Here, the advert suggests that the reader takes a look inside the Sol-20 to reveal "a simple elegance of design and sturdy construction".
Date created: 28 January 2024
Sources
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