Comart Communicator: The clean simplicity outside... conceals the pedigree inside Comart - based in St. Neots, Huntingdon - had started out in 1977 as a reseller of North Star and Cromemco micros imported from the US. It soon started building its own third-party boards for North Star machines as these were apparently hard to source[source: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/comart-communicator.78270/]. [picture: northstar_wp_praccomp_jan80.jpg|One of Comart's North Star Horizon boards - the Comart VDM display module, which included VDM *Star word processing software, so the machine could become an instant "word processor". From PRAC, January 1980] [picture: comart_crom_percw_jan81.jpg|An advert for Comart the reseller, showing the Cromemco Z-2, which had been around since 1977. From PCW, January 1981] Before long, it was building its own entire systems, including the subject of the main advert - the CP100 Communicator, released around 1980. The CP100 Communicator was an S-100-based system "specifically developed to suit British operating conditions and communications requirements". This included support for Prestel - the dial-up viewdata service that had been launched in 1979. It ran CP/M - the popular operating system of the day - on a Zilog Z80 CPU. Comart was still selling the CP100 model as late as the end of 1983. [picture: comart_praccompsupp_mar83.jpg|An advert for the Communicator, plus one of Comart's newer smart terminals. From a PRAC supplement, March 1983]