TeleVideo Advert - October 1982

From the company which over its lifetime sold millions of terminals comes a range of 16-bit micros that look somewhat like, er, terminals.

That wasn't really a coincidence as Richard DuBridge, executive vice-president of TeleVideo, admitted when had said to InfoWorld about the company's new range of computers that:

"Going from making terminals to making computers is not a big a step as the other way round. As you can see, we utilised a lot of our current knowledge and technology in designing our new computer systems^[1]".

Featured in the advert is the TS 1600 intelligent workstation, which was a bit like the TS 1602 stand-alone workstation also shown - at the front - but didn't have any of its own storage, downloading everything it needed from a central server unit.

There's a passing reference to this idea in the advert, with the central processor - which offered up to 141MB of hard disk storage - shown connected to a number of TS 1600 units via glowing red fireballs.

This makes it very much a pre-cursor to ideas like cheap IBM clones that would boot off a network, or the "thin client" of the late 1990s. So much so that TeleVideo ended up creating a thin-client business which it ended up selling to NeoWare for $3.35 million in cash (about £5 million in 2026) in October 2005^[2].

TeleVideo's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. From a TeleVideo Systems Inc sales brochure, March 1983

The TS 1600 range all ran a 5MHz Intel 8088 CPU, with the CP/M-86 operating system, together with GSX-86 extensions for the optional high-resolution 1280x804 pixel graphics^[3].

They could also co-operate with an 8-bit "service processor" and/or other 8-bit user stations on the RS422 network.

The price quoted on the advert suggests £1,629 for the TS 1600 workstation, however it also points out that that's on the assumption that the exchange rate was $2 to £1.

That particular rate hadn't actually been valid since June of 1981, and the pound was at the time sliding towards almost parity with the dollar, which it got close to in February 1985.

As such, the price of any computer hardware imported from the US was especially volatile, with the same TW 1600 costing £1,629 + VAT in October 1982 (about £9,290 in 2026), or more like £2,620 plus VAT (£11,900) a year later.

TeleVideo, which had been founded in 1975 as a producer of smart text terminals, was relatively unusual in surviving not just to the end of the 1970s but through the era of the IBM PC and right into the 2000s.

However, it entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2006^[4], and again in 2008. It finally ended manufacturing of its terminal products in 2011^[5].