Transam Advert - September 1982
From Practical Computing
Designed for expanding minds
This advert for the Transam Tuscan S100 curiously features product photos of the older Tuscan before it was rebranded.
However, at least it manages to be one of the few adverts for the machine where it doesn't just look like there are two big black rectangles on the front of it.
One of the features of the Tuscan S100 is - according to the advert - that it can read eighteen different floppy-disk formats, including Research Machines' 380Z, the SuperBrain, and IBM - although that's more likely to mean IBM's mainframe disk standard rather than the IBM PC, as that hadn't yet officially made it to the UK.
There's also an irony in claiming that the versatility of the S-100 bus and CP/M make the Tuscan S100 an "investment in the future".
Whilst S-100 - the bus that appeared in 1975 on the Altair 8800, where it was initially known as simply the Altair Bus - was about a year away from becoming an IEEE standard and would hang on in laboratory settings until the early 90s, CP/M was on the verge of being crushed by the arrival of the IBM PC and the MS-DOS operating system that came with it.
Date created: 21 February 2026
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