Tava Advert - March 1986

The Flyer appears to have been manufactured by Tava USA Incorporated, a company which was previously known as Replitech and which had bought out the original Tava Corporation only a couple of years after it had been founded in early 1983.

The original Tava had been selling around 2,000 IBM compatibles a month by the summer of 1984, but was expecting to double that with the launch of its Turbo Tava later in the summer of the same year, according to Tava's founding president Perry Lambda^[1].

It was also committing to produce more models based upon Intel's newer 80186 and 80286 chips, with Replitech/Tava USA seeming to have honoured this pledge as the Flyer contained the 80186^[2].

The '186, sometimes known as the iAPX 186, was a chip which didn't appear in too many computers of the day as it contained some of the hardware that other 8088-family computers needed external support chips for, rendering it incompatible with the wider IBM ecosystem.

This, however, made it popular as an embedded processor right up until 2007^[3].

Meanwhile, the Flyer - the computer with a future - was being distributed in the UK by Computer Frontier. It had a monochrome CGA 640x200 display, which gives it its letterbox look as LCD pixels are normally square, and the non-hard-disk version supported a battery pack which made it actually usable on the road.

It appeared to retail for around £2,500 in 1985, which is about £9,680 in 2024.

The Tava first appeared in the UK at the Personal Computer World show in Olympia in 1985, but sales of it - and in the wider market as a whole - were initially slow. However, by 1986 the market for IBM compatible portables was finally "taking off", and Tava returned to the 1986 show with new features and improvements.

These included an improved high-contrast back-lit display, and IBM 3270 terminal emulation, which according to Personal Computer World would be:

"a boon for big-business users working away from base, because it means they will be able to use their Flyer as a terminal for the company's central computer system^[4]."