Zytek Advert - December 1982

The McCombo microcomputer from Zytec is yet another Z80 CP/M 2.2 system, and like many of these, neither the company or the computer itself seems to have left any trace.

However, it's slightly more interesting than some in the approach the company is taking, which is to only supply the base unit and let the purchaser get the rest - terminal, printers, or whatever - from whereever they want.

The design of the micro is also a bit different from the usual run-of-the-mill box, and of course the name is somewhat surprising: McDonald's, the company that is infamous for naming everything McWhatever, had been around in the UK since 1974, so it would be surprising if Sytek wasn't aware of it.

So maybe the American burger chain simply didn't assert its trading-name style in the early 1980s, or perhaps the company's founders really were Scottish.

Although there's not much information about Zytek or its micro, other than it ran a 4MHz Z80A and provided four RS232 ports for mainframe connection, it's likely that the McCombo itself came out of an eight-month market-research project in April 1982 - eight months before this advert - at Discom of Evesham.

The idea was to design a compact single-board multi-user micro which could run CP/M and which was small enough to cram into a terminal or disk-drive housing, and which crucially would require little or no further development costs in order to turn it into a working system.

Discom even reckoned that its McCombo was the micro which would "take on the world and win", with initial reaction to the McCombo idea being so good that the company was forecasting sales of 3,000 units for 1982^[1]".

And so, it looks like Zytek had run with this idea and - as Discom had intended - had shoved one of the boards into what is essentially a floppy disk unit and was selling it under the same McCombo name.

It's even alluding to the fact that the McCombo board could be the star of any system.

There's no price shown for Zytek's integration, but introductory prices for the bare McCombo boards started from under £400, which is about £1,980 in 2026.

To add to the confusion, the same McCombo box was advertised in May 1982's Personal Computer World, but then it was apparently designed and built in the UK by Megabrain Computers Limited.

Given that the two companies resided at the same Ganton Street, Soho address though, it looks simply like a change of company name - perhaps Megabrain just sounded too much like a cartoon villain.

That advert does however actually give a price for the Zytek/Megabrain double-disk McCombo of £1,088 plus VAT, or about £6,200 now.

The company didn't seem to last too long as, according to a post from Stewart Bell of either manufacturer Zytek or developer/designer Discom^[2], the floppy disk drives that the company had sourced from Olivetti were "rubbish" and it went bust.