A computer can get awfully bored when it can't communicate!

Heathkit was another of those companies better known for its consumer and technical electronics, but which jumped in to the market opened up by the MITS Altair 8800. 

This advert is actually for a couple of peripherals: the base system was the Heathkit H8, but it was fairly useless without a means of input and storage, hence this advert for the H9 Video Terminal and the H10 Paper Tape Reader. 

The latter is interesting in its own right as it seems to be the latest reference to the continued use of paper tape as a storage mechanism at this point in the development of computers - everything else was already using 5.25" or 8" floppies. 

Perhaps it's the price - at $350 (or about [[233|1978]] in [[now]] money) it was cheap compared to a thousand-dollar floppy unit.

Heath - the company behind Heathkit and which was owned by Schlumberger - was taken over in January 1980 by Zenith Radio[source: "Heath reshuffle", Personal Computer World, February 1980, p. 34]. 

Schlumberger itself had only just acquired legendary U.S. chip manufacturer Fairchild - the company that spawned AMD, Intel, and a host of other "Fairchildren". 

Following the acquisition, Zenith continued to sell Heath's H100 computer, re-branded as the <a href="ad4_002">Zenith Data Sytems' Z-100</a>
