You'll never forget your first TMK 300 micro

Unlike the rest of the world then, as this advert appears to be a one-off - and even then it appeared in specialist systems magazine Systems International, rather than a mainstream publication like PCW.

It's for a range of micros built built by Toyo Menka Kaisha of Japan - hence TMK - and was imported into the UK by Peripheral Hardware Limited of Solihull in the West Midlands. 

TMK - later known as Tomen Corporation - was a spin-off of Mitsui & Company and was founded in Osaka in 1920. It started as an importer of raw cotton and retailer of textiles, before a process of diversification during the 1960s and beyond led it into electronics and data technology in the early 1980s[source: https://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/tomen-corporation-history/]".

Its entry-level TMK 320 came with two 8085 processors - the faster single-voltage variant of Intel's 8080 - as well as two RS232 serial ports and a Centronics parallel port for a printer. 

The TMK 320 also had two 5¼" floppies, whilst the next model up - the 330 - had 8" drives, for a bit more storage.

There were also three higher-spec models which replaced the 8085 with a 16-bit 8086 together with the Intel 8087 maths co-processor. 

Coupled with its high-resolution 640x400-pixel colour display, four RS232 ports and a built-in 10MB Winchester for the 360 model, this was actually quite a good machine - at least going by the spec.

It was even better than IBM's XT which would be released in the US two months later, although it didn't appear to support the increasingly-dominant MS-DOS, choosing instead to go with CP/M-86 on its own Disk Operating System.

All models also came with a range of business software supplied by Nippon-Univac, a Japanese offshoot of the US Sperry-Rand Corporation[source: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/01/05/archives/nippon-univac-sale.html]. 

A few years after this advert, Nippon-Univac was merged with Nippon Burroughs Company, which was owned by Unisys, to create Nippon Unisys[source: https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/nippon_univac_to_merge_with_burroughs_japan?utm_content=EP/zh-CN/search/wordpress/page/6]

