U-Micro Advert - March 1986

With customers as diverse as British Telecom, Oxford and Cambridge universities, the British Cast Iron Research Association and London Weekend Television, U-Microcomputers Limited of Warrington, Cheshire, was a company that seemed to specialise in Motorola 68000 microcomputers - both as single- and multi-user systems - that were aimed specifically at developers, or rather programmers as they were known in the 70s and 80s.

It also supplied its own multi-user operating system in the form of Mirage, which as well as offering CP/M-68K as a "sub task" also supported as much memory as was available, unlike native CP/M - or even MS-DOS - which topped out at 64K.

The U-MAN Series 1000 Supermicro shipped with a 10MHz 68000, along with a Motorola 6809 - the same processor as found in the Dragon home computer but used just for I/O - plus up to 15MB of memory.

And thanks to its target software-developer market, it also came with an extensive range of languages for either CP/M or the optional UCSD p-system.

A U-MAN system with a 10MB hard disk retailed from £3,789, which is around £13,800 in 2024 money. However, the company was offering discounts of up to 40% for programmers who could demonstrate that they were working on "bona fide projects".

The company itself seemed to start out life in the early 1980s as a manufacturer of software and hardware products for the Apple II.

Hardware included boards like the U-Z80 second-processor card for £95, which is around £490 in 2024, or a £195 eight-port RS232 serial interface for plugging in either a lot of printers, or terminals.