Toyo Menka Advert - January 1983

Unlike the rest of the world then, as this advert appears to be a one-off - and even then it appeared in specialist systems magazine Systems International, rather than a mainstream publication like Personal Computer World.

It's for a range of micros built built by Toyo Menka Kaisha of Japan - hence TMK - and was imported into the UK by Peripheral Hardware Limited of Solihull in the West Midlands.

The 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.

All models also came with a range of business software supplied by Nippon-Univac, a Japanese offshoot of the US Sperry-Rand Corporation^[1].

A few years after this advert, Nippon-Univac was merged with Nippon Burroughs Company, which was owned by Unisys, to create Nippon Unisys^[2]