TeleVideo Advert - August 1986

TeleVideo - the terminals company founded in San Jose, California, in 1975 - was one of relatively few companies from that era which survived through the era of the IBM PC and beyond, going on until it was "disestablished" in 2011^[1].

Not only did it survive, but here it's going head-to-head with IBM with its TeleCAT-286, a micro based on Intel's 80286 which was aimed at IBM's latest AT, but apparently priced the same as Big Blue's earlier XT machine.

Mind you, that wasn't always difficult as IBM was never known to be especially cheap. Even so, £2,695 is about £9,830 in 2024.

In 1987, the company was moving into the blossoming Unix workstation market and had apparently triggered a price war when it launched its Telstar 386 workstation at Comdex in June.

Within a few weeks of the launch of the Intel 80386-based system, major workstation manufacturers Sun, Apollo, DEC and HP had all dropped their prices, effectively halving the cost of entry-level Unix systems^[2].

TeleVideo had also purchased 75% of Microport Systems Inc., a Unix System V supplier which had been particularly active in Europe.

Talking of Europe, the advert's notable in that it's possibly one of the first from TeleVideo's new international outpost, which was based at Woking in Surrey, UK.