Toyo Menka Advert - January 1983

Unlike the rest of the world then, as this advert didn't appear that often, with this placing in specialist systems magazine Systems International and the occasional appearance in Practical Computing.

It's for a range of micros built built by Toyo Menka Kaisha of Japan - hence TMK - but which had been originally commissioned from Sanyo by Nippon-Univac.

It was originally sold only in Japan, but when Univac decided it wanted to ship only its own products, the international marketing rights were sold to the "massive Japanese trading organisation" Toya Menka. The micros were then imported into the UK by Peripheral Hardware Limited of Solihull in the West Midlands.

TMK - later known as Tomen Corporation - was a spin-off of Mitsui & Company and was founded in Osaka in 1920. It started as an importer of raw cotton and retailer of textiles, before a process of diversification during the 1960s and beyond led it into electronics and data technology in the early 1980s^[1]".

Its entry-level TMK 320 came with two 8085 processors - the faster single-voltage variant of Intel's 8080 - as well as two RS232 serial ports and a Centronics parallel port for a printer.

The TMK 320 also had two 5¼" floppies, whilst the next model up - the 330 - had 8" drives, for a bit more storage.

There were also three higher-spec models which replaced the 8085 with a 16-bit 8086 together with the Intel 8087 maths co-processor.

Coupled with its high-resolution 640x400-pixel colour display, four RS232 ports and a built-in 10MB Winchester for the 360 model, this was actually quite a good machine - at least going by the spec.

It was even better than IBM's XT which would be released in the US two months later, although it didn't appear to support the increasingly-dominant MS-DOS, choosing instead to go with CP/M-86 on its own Disk Operating System, called Supervisor.

All models also came with a range of business software supplied by Nippon-Univac, a Japanese offshoot of the US Sperry-Rand Corporation^[2].

A few years after this advert, Nippon-Univac was merged with Nippon Burroughs Company, which was owned by Unisys, to create Nippon Unisys^[3]

Although TMK seemed to shy away from mainstream advertising, its TMK 330 model did end up being reviewed by Practical Computing.

Despite complaining that the machine had a large footprint and that it took nearly all the available desk space, it concluded that it was:

"A good, solid micro that will find its way into a number of more traditional data-processing type installations. As an all-purpose office machine it is find, with some very attractive software available in Micro Repro, a package containing both word processing and spreadsheet functions. Its size and price disqualify it as a common-or-garden desktop personal system, but make it more suitable for operator use^[4]".