RAIR: Black Box III Microcomputer solutions

Nearly nine years before the band Black Box released chart-topping track "Ride on Time", the other "Black Box" - from RAIR - was released. 

Based on Intel's 8085, and later 8088 CPUs, and with an impressive 200MB of disk access and capable of supporting 16 users, apparently the only thing micro about it was the price - although it's obviously not cheap enough to actually put that in the advert. 

[picture: RAIR_330_prac_sep81.webp|An advert for RAIR's 3/30 model which appeared a few months later in September 1981's PRAC. This advert doesn't show a price either, despite claiming an "attractive price tag", but it does offer a rental scheme - something not normally found with budget microcomputers]

The internals of the Black Box were also licenced to British computer behemoth ICL, and became part of the ICL Personal Computer - PCN commenting on the latter in 1983 that it was "a RAIR Black Box by any other name"[source: "ICL to launch against Lisa?", Personal Computer News, September 15 1983, p. 6].

At the end of 1981, RAIR became on of the first computer companies to offer new high-speed dynamic (DRAM) 64Kbit memory chips as an upgrade, when it offered a 256K board for the Black Box at the bargain price of £1,250. 

That's around [[1250|1981]] in [[now]], or [[23|1981]] million per gigabyte.

