Sord/CGL Advert - November 1982

Sord, which had been selling its M100 and M200 business-focused micros in the UK since the early part of 1979^[1], is here advertising software rather than any of its actual hardware, but that's probably because this is really an advert for potential resellers, rather than the public.

That said, it's still a bit abstract, as it's advertising its PIPS - Pan Information Processing System - as a solution to the problem of the BASIC programming language.

Sord's M100 micro, as seen in August 1979's Practical Computing

PIPS was a high-level language apparently 20-times easier to learn than BASIC, although it's answering a question that wasn't really being asked: although BASIC had many shortcomings, it was by far the most popular home-computer programming language for a reason - it was already easy-enough to learn.

Sord had opened up a UK headquarters in London at the end 1982 in order to spearhead its full-on launch into the UK market.

However, the president of Sord, Takayoshi Shiina, who was in London for the opening, was wary of the existing incumbents in the UK, saying:

"Britain has a really good company - Sinclair. If possible I would like to join with Sinclair in this market for mutual benefit. The market is so large and I don't like competition^[2]".

Sord, which was at the time the fastest-growing company in Japan, actually attributed its success to its PIPS spreasheet-cum-database package, which it said sold Sord's systems in the same way as VisiCalc used to sell Apples.

The hardware which is mentioned in passing in the advert includes the Sord M5, which had been launched in Tokyo only the month before.

This was a Z80-based machine which was almost an MSX micro - a standard devised by Microsoft Japan which was meant to make things easier for software and hardware manufacturers.

It didn't do too well in the UK as although its price put it in the "ferocious under £200 market"^[3], it was still more expensive that Sinclair's Spectrum or even Commodore's 64 - both of which had thousands of software titles backing them up.

MSX didn't do that much either. Although the Japanese invasion had been feared since the 1970s, Japanese companies were hesitant to take on the highly-competitive UK market until they were absolutely sure, and by that time it was too late.