Hmmm.... Where do I start? Your searches brought up a few unanswered questions right off the bat, wrt the company registration, etc.
I started reading and then stopped, merely skimming the rest after coming across "256 dynamic RAM memory" - 256 what of DRAM? PetaBytes? Okay, so that's just grammar, yet it continues, so not a good look for someone marketing a $6000 product with a proofed magazine ad.
But that's not all, and this didn't so much as give me a chuckle, as questioning the authenticity of the ad's provenance:
86-DOS (QDOS) didn't exist before 1980, and my 5.25" floppy of IBM PC DOS v1.01 is Copyright 1981, yet the ad from the December 1978 issue of Byte magazine's Copyright/Trademark attribution lists DOS, BASIC, Pascal, and COBOL as registered to Microsoft, yet MS-DOS wasn't released until August 12, 1981 (almost 3 years later).
What initially captured my attention was what in the IBM microcomputer world would later probably be a Personal Computer Expansion Unit sitting atop a 5150 (https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/21352/IBM-5161/), and it looks to me like an ethernet switch with ports in the front - I'm sure it's not (obviously), but from the photo that's what it made me think of.
The three ads differ in the content, but the photo of this good looking behemoth is the same across the 3 year span of it's marketing. Really really odd. I suppose the travesty here is that we only have 'some' information on this machine which, for as kewl as it appears to be, ends up without much in the way of anthropological posterity.
Perhaps others will come forward with some tasty tidbits of information on this particular product that didn't seem to change much at all during its retail life-cycle.
Thanks John Paul, I love getting your newsletters and likewise reminisce over historical computing machinery, hoping for better documentation and preservation for this era of (what we called back then) 'data processing'. That's a really kewl find that you've shared with us all there :)
Back in the early days of computing, the sheer number of attempts by companies to be the next big thing is staggering. It was a great time to be alive, even if you could only play with most of them was in stores. :)
Or like I used to play Gemstone Warrior on the Apple 2 before school started using the home-ec Apple IIe :) Man, that was fun...
The other point is that they seem to offer a lot of advances options which would not be available in the end-user system, such as the math coprocessor, an 8086 (16 bit bus, very niche back then) and so it could also be that, as a developper machine, they made a wrong positioning.
This also gives me serious vibes that they could be repacking/reslling some imported design in a kind of OEM agreement.
Hmmm.... Where do I start? Your searches brought up a few unanswered questions right off the bat, wrt the company registration, etc.
I started reading and then stopped, merely skimming the rest after coming across "256 dynamic RAM memory" - 256 what of DRAM? PetaBytes? Okay, so that's just grammar, yet it continues, so not a good look for someone marketing a $6000 product with a proofed magazine ad.
But that's not all, and this didn't so much as give me a chuckle, as questioning the authenticity of the ad's provenance:
86-DOS (QDOS) didn't exist before 1980, and my 5.25" floppy of IBM PC DOS v1.01 is Copyright 1981, yet the ad from the December 1978 issue of Byte magazine's Copyright/Trademark attribution lists DOS, BASIC, Pascal, and COBOL as registered to Microsoft, yet MS-DOS wasn't released until August 12, 1981 (almost 3 years later).
What initially captured my attention was what in the IBM microcomputer world would later probably be a Personal Computer Expansion Unit sitting atop a 5150 (https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/21352/IBM-5161/), and it looks to me like an ethernet switch with ports in the front - I'm sure it's not (obviously), but from the photo that's what it made me think of.
The three ads differ in the content, but the photo of this good looking behemoth is the same across the 3 year span of it's marketing. Really really odd. I suppose the travesty here is that we only have 'some' information on this machine which, for as kewl as it appears to be, ends up without much in the way of anthropological posterity.
Perhaps others will come forward with some tasty tidbits of information on this particular product that didn't seem to change much at all during its retail life-cycle.
Thanks John Paul, I love getting your newsletters and likewise reminisce over historical computing machinery, hoping for better documentation and preservation for this era of (what we called back then) 'data processing'. That's a really kewl find that you've shared with us all there :)
Back in the early days of computing, the sheer number of attempts by companies to be the next big thing is staggering. It was a great time to be alive, even if you could only play with most of them was in stores. :)
Or like I used to play Gemstone Warrior on the Apple 2 before school started using the home-ec Apple IIe :) Man, that was fun...
Indeed the ad is quite vague... Seems like a good copywriter wrote it but it doesn't focus on as much technicality as used to be the case back then.
It could also be that they sold very few systems.
I mean in the end their big use case and proposed differentiator seems to be a RAMDISK...
The other point is that they seem to offer a lot of advances options which would not be available in the end-user system, such as the math coprocessor, an 8086 (16 bit bus, very niche back then) and so it could also be that, as a developper machine, they made a wrong positioning.
This also gives me serious vibes that they could be repacking/reslling some imported design in a kind of OEM agreement.