Magazines of Yesteryear - Personal Computer World Vol. 14 No. 11 - November 1991

1991 was quite the year for personal computing, with Windows 3.0 making headway and pushing the XT-level spec out of the market place. This allowed the 286 to have a brief time in the sun as the sweet spot between price and performance (the sub £1,000 home market at least) - albeit with an all too painful awareness that it wasn't exactly future proof. For this issue of PCW, however, the undoubted cover star  was the Apple PowerBook 100, and deservedly so. That will come later, because as always, we begin with the news. 

Novell take first spot with the introduction of Novell NetWare Lite, a (relatively) reasonably priced peer to peer networking option. Although limited in functionality to its more expensive cousins, it filled a need at that time, although that period was relatively short as networking was on it's way to becoming a "standard" OS inclusion at least as far as Windows was concerned. Other OS's had had such capabilities for quite a while.

Microsoft had two new packages to shout about: Microsoft Works for Windows and Microsoft Publisher. The former brought Works to the GUI world, rocking a word processor, spreadsheet, and data filing capabilities, whilst Publisher tackled that design favourite of the 80's and 90's, desktop publishing. You may laugh now, but back then, having the ability to design your own print materials (you do remember printing, right?) was seen as a game changer. Anyway, each cost £145, and the minimum spec for Works (Publisher's weren't listed) was a 286 running Windows 3 with 1Mb of RAM or better. No, gentle reader, you would NOT try that at home. Yes, the OS would "run", but you really needed 2Mb or more and, let's be honest here, a 386. Good thing that Works for MS-DOS was still available for those not willing/able to drop a grand plus (as you'll see later) on new hardware. 

What in the world? PC World? Where in the world? Croydon. Well, you've got to start from somewhere, so why not? Taking the American concept of computer superstores, Vision Technology attempted to replicate the idea in the UK. Why would you pay more than mail order to have to travel to a store? Well, making use of your warranty for one thing - you could always go back to the shop. Knowledge (and some staff were very knowledgable if you were lucky) was another. As it turned out, Dixons would buy the chain of the then four stores in 1993, massively expand the footprint, then re-brand to mother company Currys Digital around 2006, and from 2010, carry the Currys PC World moniker until 2021. Not a bad run, it has to be said. 

Adobe promised support for Quarterdeck's DesqView-X windowing system, to which all I can say is, "bless them", and "some you win, some you lose, and then there's some that needn't have bothered in the first place." What? You think Microsoft were in danger here??? Pshaw!

"Top men" (very Raiders of the Lost Ark sounding and also highly emblematic of the time) were talking about the Apple-IBM development deal, which tied in with the AIM alliance (Motorola being the third company), in developing a new multi-user, multi-tasking operating system. It's not exactly a spoiler to say that the software side of things did not work out, although the Power PC range of processors were a valid competitor to the x86 into the early years of the next century.

One of the joys of reading through magazines of yesteryear is finding news snippets like this - the PIC from General Magic. The Personal Intelligent Communicator was an attempt to put real time data in the hands of users via a pen-driven palmtop. No, it wasn't a proto-Newton, although the article does state that full cursive handwriting recognition would come later. Uh-huh. As it turned out, Apple never really got behind General Magic, despite what the article attempts to predict. General Magic's Magic Cap operating system would see the light of day in Sony's Magic Link and Motorola's Envoy PDA's, but never really took off. The tech was cool for the time, but expensive and rather bulky, and when the Newton did arrive, it too was criticised for its size, even though it was slightly smaller than either of the Magic Cap devices. The concept of a personal digital assistant would prove more popular with either a keyboard (Psion Series 3) or a more limited stylus functionality (the Palm OS menagerie), but you have to admire the bright sunlit uplands vibe of this report. 

Portable fans were offered the news of Apple's Companion, an 11 by 6 inch two pound system with a full keyboard. Aimed at the same user as the Cambridge Z88, the device was never released. A couple of years later, we did get the aforementioned Newton, so make of that what you will. 

For true power users, Dolch had released their PAC 486-50 "portable" - an 8.2kg behemoth (and it was mains only!), rocking the latest 50MHz 486, 8Mb of RAM, a 200Mb SCSI hard drive, a colour TFT display, and space for three full length EISA cards. Yours for just £13,790! Do you really want to know the 2025 price? Ok then: £32,000! Budget conscious peeps could swap the colour TFT for a gas plasma wonder to make the price a much more "palatable" £6,995. Other manufacturers were also joining the 486 rush - NEC's 20MHz SX number was yours for about six grand, and PM Associates' lappy was just £2,849, although the article declines to give specifications beyond it being a 486. 

Road warriors were also being offered a portable satellite comms dish. Niche, given that it cost the best part of ten grand, but handy if you needed the capability. Speed was limited to 600 bits per second, and the data was charged at 63p per kilobit. Makes Virgin Media Fibre look almost a bargain. 

There's a healthy three pages of letters, one of which caught my attention: a spirited defence of the Acorn Archimedes, as well as a carefully argued response from PCW. The letter writer isn't necessarily wrong in the support for the British machine, but the magazine's response rightly questions whether the total number sold (approximately 120,000 in four years against Apple selling 125,000 Mac Classics in one month), and the familiarity users would get with an Arc against a Mac or PC (Word for the latter two platforms being a good example) were enough to support the continued use of RISC OS, especially when it came down to preparing children for the jobs market.

Several pages of opinion pieces give way to the short reviews section, bringing up Elonex's LT-320X which, in case you couldn't have guessed, uses a 20MHz 386. The base model (2Mb RAM, 40Mb HD) would set you back £1,495 (ex VAT, of course) and received praise for the concept of removable hard drives. However, at 15lbs, it was bit of a chonk, even for the time. 

Apricot's LANstation is another niche product, and a pricey one too. A 20MHz 386 backed up by 8Mb of RAM and a 100Mb hard drive sounds ok, but at £2,195, not great value. Still, for dedicated network uses, it was an option, and there is something to be said about the pleasing appearance of the machine. 

The first feature takes the reader to Yorktown Heights and IBM's Thomas J Watson Research Centre. Quite informative, the bulk of the article focuses on the strengths and uses for Big Blue's RS/6000 system - the Power Visualisation System (data displays for a super computer) and virtual reality. Yeah... some concepts keep being flogged... What strikes me here is that although the PC side of the company (including OS/2) was burning at this point, they were still forging ahead with research and development. How times have changed...

The hardware group test takes in twenty 33MHz 486 towers. The format had its attractions, what with a compact footprint but room for expansion, and for power users or those who just wanted to bling their kit with drives and cards galore, they were the way forward, for the time at least. What I like about this round up is not only the clean layout, but also the performance graphs - given the number of computers on test, an easy way to see where each contender lay in the pack. And check out CompuAdd's results - oh dear!

We still get the traditional specification table, and from a quick glance, the cheapest of what are DX-powered (the SX chip minus the floating point unit would be along presently) machines started at £1,708 ex VAT (also excluding Windows and limited to 4Mb of RAM and a 124Mb hard drive) for the Micro Surgeons Eagle 486c to the frankly ludicrous Nokia (8Mb/8Gb) and Zenith (8Mb/360Mb) offerings coming in at a fiver below ten grand ex VAT! The Eagle was reasonable value for the low price, but the Nokia couldn't justify its tag, and the Zenith, an absolute massive unit, was a pricey server option. In any case, if you needed a fast 486, you were spoilt for choice, but within a year, those prices would have dropped considerably. 

As for the winner, Dell's 433Se (32Mb/200Mb) at £6,234 ex walked away with it. Silver medals went to MJN's 486 Cache (£2,799 ex with 8Mb/210Mb), Solidisk's 486-33 EISA (£3,669 ex with 4Mb/320Mb) and the Zenith. 

One last comment: the contents page has a wonderful lead in to the round up. Bask in the glory of what £80k ex VAT could have bought you back in '91. Put another way not even one third of an averagely priced house these days. 

Apple takes a ten page bite out of the issue with their new machines, and to be fair to them, PCW led with the most striking of the lot - the PowerBook 100, yours for the bargain price of under £1,350 ex VAT. Compared to its Portable predecessor, the PB100 was quite the looker. Sure, it was a tad limited next to its more expensive siblings, the 140 and 170, but the more you paid, the more you got - internal floppy drives and faster 68030 chips on both, and an active matrix greyscale screen on the 170. For people after a basic Mac you could use of on the move for two to four hours (those Ni-Cad batteries were average for the day), the 16MHz 68000 of the PB100 would see you right. The author did note that the 140 and 170 lacked anywhere near the value of the base model, but it's Apple, right?

Portables were not the only fruit (apologies to Jeanette Winterson), as Apple was keen to show off its Quadra 900 tower - and although hard drive equipped prices were not mentioned, the floppy only model would be approximately £4,500. That, gentle reader, was a spec about as useful as a shoe shop in the Shire. The cheaper Quadra 700 had an estimated price of £4k ex VAT for a 4Mb/80Mb model. Power with a price! 

Not that potential Mac users were entirely left out. The aforementioned and much loved Mac Classic was given an upgrade too. The handily named Classic II (easy day in the marketing department right there), popped in a 68030 for the previous 68000, and, in typical Apple fashion, although the 2Mb or RAM as standard was "enough," System 7.0 really liked 4Mb, so once more unto the chequebook, dear friends. Apple were also adding some printers and a scanner to their line up, but these seemed to be mere afterthoughts to the more exciting portable news. 

To software now, and Winfax Pro promised to make faxing as easy as printing (and when in the ever loving arms of Cthulhu has that ever been easy???), whilst an interview with Gordon Eubanks of Symantec offers insights into its recent merger with Peter Norton Computing (yes, them!), and its plans for the future. 

A round up of project management programs is of some interest, being a victim, apologies, a user of JIRA. In fact, after reading through this, I'd take any of the packages here over Just Irritates Really Awfully. As for the conclusion comments on some of the packages, well, dear hearts, I feel attacked. Attacked, I tell you!

That could have been my Q3 review, to be fair.

DesqView 386 received a favourable review, and offered good value, at least until Windows NT could demonstrate its chops. No mater how good the competition though, Microsoft were on a roll in the early 90's and having the likes of IBM screw up OS/2 meant the other competitors, such as Quarterdeck's offering, were on a hiding to nothing. 

Ah, here we go, my old friend. A review of the Psion Series 3, and as a recovery from the MC-range debacle, the Series 3 was a stunner. The reviewer obviously liked it, and the fact that the Series 3 would only be discontinued in 1998 after several improved models, demonstrated that Psion pretty much got the basics right first time - the 3a, 3c and 3mx were useful upgrades (especially the screen size), but the design stayed pretty much the same. 

Book reviews cover such topics as designing minimalist instruction for practical computer skill (when such a thing was quite pertinent if you were a newbie), Pagemaker 4, and virtual reality. Yep, I'm repeating myself here, but nearly thirty five years later and it's still not there as a genuinely useful and productive piece of consumer tech. 

Castles and Mario Andretti's Racing Challenge were your games for the month, and check out those software charts. The subtle differences between ST and Amiga, then Amiga and PC were symptomatic of how the three platforms were performing in relation to each other. It's clear that the PC was the home of the more demanding software, with the Amiga and ST kinda keeping up, but the bog-standard 68000-powered machines were long in the tooth by now. 

Finally, the Hands On section has the usual array of topics of general and more specific interest.

Adverts time and we'll start with Compstand, a reseller with a goodly array of Amstrad, Olivetti and Tandon machines. Not entirely sure who would be buying mono display, single floppy '086's, but hey, £279 ex... For printer aficionados, it was fill your boots time with that selection as well. 

Morgan were keeping the remainder world alive with their usual stock of bargains - that Zenith Minisport was a handy portable, although thankfully equipped with an external 3.5 inch floppy drive as good luck finding any 2 inch stock... anywhere. 

Micro Surgeons backed up their 486 (see above) with what appears to be quite the bargain - a 286 with a 14 inch mono display, 40Mb hard drive and a meg of memory. Throw in DOS 5.0 and a dot matrix printer for a bundle price of £499 ex VAT. Considering a 9-pin printer would retail for a ton, and it appeared to be good value. Not sure about the brag that you could switch on and start typing your next book (no dedicated word processor, but MS-DOS Editor would have let you start with basic text files), and more expensive than an inkjet-equipped PCW 9512, but for a DOS option, not too bad-ish. Of course, spending more would buy you a some future proofing... as well as VGA graphics... Yeah, corners had been cut, and a perusal elsewhere would find you better value.

Crown Computer Products were going full on Epson with a pair of deals that would have appealed to me back then - the first being a 12MHz 286 laptop rocking 640kb of RAM and a 20Mb hard drive for just £699 ex, and a 10MHz 286 desktop for just £399 ex including 640kb of RAM, a 20Mb hard drive and a (possibly unbranded) VGA mono monitor. 

The former stands out due to the software offer - two of an array of eleven packages for free. Personally, the MS-DOS v5.0 upgrade and Wordstar Express would have been my pick - and pity anyone attempting to get Windows 3, also on offer, running on that spec.

The latter ditches the software bundle, instead tempting buyers with a cheap XT portable. Twin floppy drives, 640kb of RAM and DOS 3.2 - yours normally for £399 ex VAT, but bundled with the EL2 desktop, just £299. To be fair, these were clearance bargains, for for basic use even in late 1991, they would have done the job. Just remember the comment I made about the Micro Surgeons bundle.

Along side the review, Psion also had a two page ad in the news section, and it's quite an effective one - uncluttered, informative, and playing up very much to the key selling points. And at just £200 inclusive of VAT, a bargain, surely? 

MJN sold a goodly range of machines, as well as displaying a smidge more information for potential purchasers than some of its competitors. Explanation of the differences between the 286 and 386 is a nice touch, and the basic specs of that 16MHz 386SX - 2Mb of RAM, 43Mb hard drive, both 3.5" and 5.25" floppies and a 1Mb SVGA card (not a guarantee by any means for many a desktop), for £999 ex VAT is about right for the time. Of more local interest, the back page of their pull-out lists a number of companies they have supplied - and there, just past the half way mark, is the North of England Building Society. They would only be around for another three years before being acquired by the Northern Rock Building Society who then demutualised in 1997 and, well, yes... look what happened to them. Definitely should have stayed a building society... 

Time Computer Systems booked several ads in this issue. This one is of particular note as it shows the Dolch portables previously mentioned in the news. Chunky beasts, but with such "portable" power, and no purchase prices listed, but at £104 per week excluding VAT for a three(!) year lease... 

Diamond bring us to the end of this issue with their hawking of Philips' desktop range, and for reasonably priced clones they were... reasonably priced clones, despite a distinct lack of expansion opportunities. Those seeking fun would benefit from the inclusion of Indiana Jones! Both 286 and 386 machines bundled the Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade adventure game, alongside World Class Leader Board Pro Golf Simulator (and breathe!), and if your needs were suited to DOS, much like previously mentioned ads, they were ok. But merely ok. The future was Windows, the 386/486, and Super VGA graphics, and the likes of MJN offered better value than the likes of Philips. 

Anyway, that's it for 1991. For the next Magazines of Yesteryear, I'm feeling a yearning for the valleys, for there be Dragons in them there hills. 

Magazines of Yesteryear - Personal Computer World - Volume 1 Number 2 1978

Nothing says computers in the 1970's like a maths equation, and with this second issue of PCW, published in April 1978, one way to escape the drudgery of maths was to use a computer - in this case, a Commodore PET. It was early days for the micro, but if you were sufficient of heel, you too could have joined in the fun. And since we're delving back 47 years here, I have relied upon the Bank of England inflation calculator to provide a rough guide to what those far off prices are like today, placed in brackets after the original prices. Please keep in mind that perceived value is something else entirely, as is the actual cost of living - just as Switch 2 games at £75 might be, inflation-wise, similar value than cart games of the early 1990's, seventy five quid is still seventy five quid, and times have most definitely changed. With that noted, on with the magazine.

The publisher's letter on page two grabs your attention immediately, with the heartening news of expected sales of the debut issue hitting 25,000, and some 3,000 subscribers. As will become apparent, just because there were not that many micros in the UK (for sale or actually sold), that didn't mean there wasn't keen interest in computers. Small acorns and all that...

The letters page has the first doozy of the issue, and it's that age-old complaint regarding US and UK pricing - the PET being £695 (£3,700), whereas the US price equated to £305 (£1,600). The author concedes taxes, country specific alterations and logistical costs, but still questions the difference. He also queries Tandy's possible pricing, which turned out to be similarly "high", but hey, individual markets and "reasons" - it certainly didn't matter whether the US had more disposable household income or not - and that was a very general assumption.

One does, however, love the response to the question as to why the US edition of PCW was not $1, so there you go. 

Note, also, the rather tetchy letter from Keith of Intel regarding Guy Kewney's issue one piece on the brief history of the computer. And that final paragraph - be told! 

Contents page.

The first article of entitled "Power to the People", and given 47 years of technological advancement and capitalism, it's rather quaint but also quite prophetic in some instances - flat panel displays and networking, anyone. OK, not huge leaps of faith but an interesting feature nonetheless. 

The keypad was the usual "high quality" item... 

The Might Micromite casts its gaze on the Science of Cambridge MK14 computer kit - well, single board computer, a highly useful and very affordable opening into the world of computing, as the above ad states, at only £39.95 plus £3.20 VAT and postage (or £43.55 (£230) in the order form! - just state the total cost, you planks, marketing be damned!). The author confides that he is sure it will do very well, and if you know your history, Science of Cambridge was previously called Sinclair Instrument Ltd, before evolving into Sinclair Computers and thence Sinclair Research. As for the article, it covers the basics of what the board offers, and what you can do with it. 

Since this was the very early days of the micro, the kit option was often the most affordable, and "The Compleat Kit Builder" feature gives you all the info about the kit you needed to get started. And it was a lot, to be honest. The approach is about right even for the newbie. Oh, and points for cuteness using the archaic spelling for a then-modern tech. 

More user information is on hand with "Yes, but what does the little beast do?" Not a guide to youth-based chimney cleaning from the 1900's (because it should be), but an illustrative guide as to what a microprocessor actually does. Again, aimed at the beginners to the hobby, it should be remembered that at this point, the average person's exposure to computers would have been as a huge box with lots of lights, spinning tapes, and either the offer of light comedy or end of humanity levels of threat. I jest, but this was the kind of article that was needed for the prospective audience. You might have an interest, but in those days, the practical aspects of form and function were important in garnering understanding for end users. 

BASIC - The First Steps is another introductory guide and yes, gentle reader, we have "HELLO" as the first program. It warms the cockles of me 'eart, it does, and the instructions on the use of specific keys highlights just how alien using a computer would have been to some new users - telling people that pressing the "delete" key once removed the last character typed, pressing it twice removed the last two, may seem positively ridiculous now, but given that if you had used a "keyboard" back then, it would likely have been a manual typewriter, these basics were much needed. 

Speaking of which, "Typing Without Tears" aimed to give readers a helpful hand in how to improve their typing skills via two routines, since the primary way of interacting with a computer would remain the keyboard for years to come (and still is for most uses). Given how bad some keyboards on early micros would be (IBM PC Jnr, any Sinclair product - I will die on that hill -  Jupiter, Oric, Atari 400, and yes, the machine of the day as far as this issue of PCW goes, the Commodore PET), one can only look back in amazement and wonder what the actual fuck was going on in the heads of the manufacturers. It's the one accepted method of input. Don't make it shit! Mind you, I could say the same for operating systems in the 21st Century. Looking at you, Microsoft. ESPECIALLY YOU!!!

Wise words, indeed!

Harry Harrison (yes, he of the Stainless Steel Rat) is up next with a look at the Sperry K3 sight, a mechanical analogue computer in use during the Second World War. Point being, don't ignore mechanical computing from the very early days of computing itself. 

Next is an article by Guy Kewney, whose association with PCW would span many, many more years. It's a comment piece and targets the nature of the personal computer business regarding profits and sales. With a mix of anecdotes and observations, it's an intriguing look at the market as was, and signs off with the lovely observation that the high cost companies are not rip-off merchants(!), merely cautious. Over-cautious in the author's mind, and they don't yet really believe that the man-in-the-street wants to spend £300 on a computer. "They'll learn". And look what happened... by the end of 1980, the ZX80 was yours for under a ton (£420 - sweet), and Acorn's Atom for £175 (£740), both assembled. They were spoiling us by then.

What follows is best described as an infomercial. It's an article about Commodore's approach to computing, aka the Commodore PET, it's history, what it could do, and what possibilities awaited. So what, you may think? Well, it was written by Kit Spencer of Commodore UK, but hear me out. I can totally understand why this feature exists. It's a justification as to why a home micro exists and why you might want to buy one over say a MK14 or similar single board computer. Whether you could afford it was a big question, but it was one of the less expensive than most competitors. It's an informative piece and more than justifies its place in this issue. 

The good lady looks as impressed with him as she is with the PET's keyboard*

Martin Collis brings us his experience in bringing a small business system into action in a software house. After choosing an SWTP 6800 from Computer Workshop (more on them in a moment), they spec'd a 4K single interface system, added a further 12K of RAM, a second interface and a cassette controller. The reasons were price, the greater popularity of the Motorola 6800 over the Intel 8080, and the fact that there were (and then still were) plans to manufacture the kit in Britain - this would continue to be a "thing" for years to come, but times would change. The kits arrived about ten weeks later, and it took two of them about two weeks to assemble and solder the beast together. And we complain about the time taken for Windows to update. Actually, yes, we still should, if you are still using Windows. Whatever benefits Win 11 seems to have, I still consider it a dumpster fire of an OS. 

After what seemed to be a dodgy power supply that actually turned out to be duff memory involving several trips to CW, the guys were almost ready to rock and roll. Except an 8K board and the cassette interface were still en-route - and this after nearly four months had passed since ordering them... Throwing caution (and fiscal propriety) to the winds, they cancelled the cassette interface and ordered a twin mini-floppy set up that happened to be in stock. We'll get to prices shortly. 

Software wise, they ended up with version 0.9 of the BASIC when they expected version 2. Still, they got some games running on it (it's always about the games!), and were awaiting the new BASIC version as they'd found some bugs in 0.9. In summary, they found the hardware robust and reliable (albeit not liking a cold room), though the SWTP system software was iffy, and that Computer Workshop's hardware support was excellent - their software support less so. Once the new OS was ready, they would be able to start developing bespoke programs for their needs.

The cost, you may ask? The processor, twin disk drives, and 24K of RAM set them back £1,700 (£9,150). Adding a VDU (that's visual display unit, or monitor for you kids out there) and 30 character per second printer would cost a further £1,500 (£8,000), for a grand total of £3,200 (£17,150). When created, they expected the cost of their software to add £800 (£4,300) to the package, and if you needed "full size" floppy drives, that would add a further £900 (£4,800) on top. 

A similar case study, this time for a ready built system, focuses on Computech, a company that was founded in 1966 as a recruitment agency and as a developer of software for accounting machines and visible record computers. The recruitment side took off, the other, less so, but in this piece that "should be of interest to the hobbyist", (weren't they all hobbyists back then?), the focus was acquiring a computing solution with a hardware cost not exceeding £10,000 (£53,800). Their choice, as you can see, remained handily within their budget. They ended up developing in-house programs, and had at the time of this article, computerised three of their four agencies for a total outlay of about £20,000 (£107,600), and this after they had considered a mini-computer in the form of a PDP-11. As the article notes, the hardware was purchased in November 1976, first live running was April 1977, and within six months of that, things were going great. 

I mentioned Computer Workshop before, and on page 42, we have an interview with John Burnett and Gordon Ashbee of the aforementioned retailer. There's some interesting snippets here, such as a discussion on what the "hobby market" actually was - and a wonderful observation about the difference between the US and UK markets - the former had a higher level of disposable income and different tax rules, so an amateur was truly an amateur, whereas in the UK, they considered people who bought a computer as wanting a return on that investment. That and the US user would have quite the high end set up, whereas a genuine UK amateur would stick to a low cost, barebones system. There's also commentary on the future of computers in education (it's coming), and that they have grown to the point where they can't provide a truly personal service to customers anymore  - a shame but also testament to the growth of their business. 

The PET 2001 review begins with an overall impression (very well constructed and with some nice features), but the reviewer also states that they only had a day with the machine whereas a week would have been preferable. As a review, it gets rather technical, but the last paragraph is a one for the times, leaving a number of questions hanging. Yes, you can easily form an impression, but what happens when you expansion and support? "These are questions worth asking and worth getting answers to" - so provide them please. It's a review, after all. Sadly, no answers are forthcoming, but the reviewer did not like the keyboard. So, do you buy one? I have no idea, and neither did the reviewer. I can't help feel that if the Spencer article and this review were combined, it would have been more helpful to the casual reader, but would have also completely torpedoed the idea of editorial independence. Oh well. 

A second review tackles the Research Machines 380Z, a box I am vaguely familiar with as Tanfield Comprehensive had a single example in one of its Archimedes A3000 suites. The review is more fun than the PET one, as the author here shows a fine line in criticism and humour - the reminder for readers to ensure all of their plugs are correctly fused is a quaint throwback to times when they still showed children how to accomplish such tasks, something that still happened in the early 1990's. Build quality came in for some criticism, with the choice of cabling and lack of shock protection causing some concern, but the software offering was highly praised. The author notes that his criticisms are mostly personal, and that if you could only afford a barebones system for £400 (£2,150), then you'd be well served, and of course the expansion options would be great for schools and businesses. A few quirks, but the reviewer was sorry to see the review unit go. 

Teaching children about maths and ultra small print.

Two programs take up the following four pages, one a pseudorandom number generator, the other a scrambling program, before we get to a piece on teaching packages for the classroom. All three include listings for those with 20:20 vision. 

A comment piece of data processing and analysis NOT happening in the NHS posits some rather good arguments as to the use of computing in medical care to deliver better patient care and outcomes. If that sounds familiar, that probably because that mantra has been repeated often of the intervening forty seven years, and this work comes from a time when you didn't have huge corporations trying to earn billions from multi-year contracts for systems that never seen to deliver on their promise. What? Me, political, pshaw! And don't get me started on data hoovering and monetisation... All I will say is that the author makes some good points, a lot has been achieved since then, but the ever-lasting presence of late stage capitalism in healthcare is royally fucking things up. 

On safer ground is the section dedicated to the Amateur Computer Club View, and the gloriously understated opinion that the £695 (£3,700) of the 8K PET is "a bit much for the average amateur." Who would have thunk it? And in a situation that would be repeated countless times over the next several years, orders for X machine have not been received. In this instance, it's the rather more affordable NASCOM-1, which famously was expected to need 200 sales to make a profit, 400 would have been great, and they sold the latter amount in the first two weeks. Mind you, considering the absolute cluster that was 8-bit micro production in general between 1980 and 1985, this was just a sign of things to come. 

A feature on the small system approach to program editing may be of interest to some - I'm an SQA bod, so whilst I can generally understand RPG in the context of financial programs, writing and editing it is another thing entirely. Hell, I can still forget the odd semi-colon on an ACS command every now and again. Anyhoo...

We have a multi-page deep dive on the E78 Europa Bus for those of a hardware mind, before the Products page, featuring the KIM-1 microcomputer system card, yours for £185 (£1,000). They were quite popular for a time, so a suitable option if the MK14 didn't appeal. 

That's it for editorial, so what about the ads? Considering the era, there are more than you'd think, but at the same time, we were still bound by the aesthetic of the period. 

We have Xitan Systems on page 2 offering a range of Z80 systems from the likes of Cromemco, North Star and Dynabyte, and from only £1,539 ex VAT (£8,300). These names would hang around for a few years, until the slow move away from the Z80 and the "joy" that was CP/M that would define a business machine. In time, PC-DOS/MS-DOS would replace CP/M as the OS of choice, mostly due to the ubiquity of the IBM PC and its kinda/sorta compatibles. True compatibility would take a little while longer to arrive, but for fans of DR's aging OS, at least Amstrad had consumer's backs by using CP/M on its PCW range until 1994. 

Comart were another distributor of the above manufacturers, and use Xitan as a local supplier. 

The Newbear Computing Store would sell you all the bits and pieces you'd likely need, including a vast array of TTL IC's (integrated circuits), literally for pennies, although something like a 2.5MHz Z80 was a more substantial £15.50 ex VAT (£85-ish). 

For books and magazines, L.P. Enterprises has you sorted, and quite the range to US publications. Check out the magazines in the right hand column - even in the beginning of times, there were choices galore for periodicals. 

Compelec Electronics wishes you entry to the Altair Age, and a range of systems that could be expanded with floppy drives and even a ten megabyte disc system, for a price obviously. The System 9V as shown for £6,781 to £7,026 (£36,500 to £37,800) hasn't any specifications listed, but one presumes it was a serious amount of kit for the time. 

Lastly, a final mention of the Computer Workshop, whose ad is straight to the point with a list of machines, in both kit and assembled form, with prices excluding VAT and carriage. 

Regular readers will know that I can be quite waspish when it comes to the magazines of yesteryear, but in this instance, I feel that approach would have been (mostly) unwarranted. This was at the dawn of personal computing, and the focus was still very much on small businesses and the amateur who could afford such frippery. Yet within a couple of years, there were moves to more readily available machines, and sure, the ZX80 was a kickstart the home owner needed, but it was by no means the only option, and you paid for what you got. Mass market offerings would take yet another year or two, and by that I mean games. You may disagree, but whatever "serious" reasons that may have existed for buying a home micro, the creation of a games industry didn't happen because Father wanted to track stocks, or Mother was busy balancing the home economics budget. And yes, those stereotypes lasted for a lot longer than many of the micros that followed these early efforts. 

As for our next sojourn to the periodicals of the past, I have not yet decided, although I feel the mid-1980's  calling. We shall see. 

* The temptation for a Geordie themed caption was high but I controlled the urge, pet.