Nascom Imp plain paper printer - boxed and built for only £325

1980 was perhaps the year of the rise of the printer, but at the time these were still very much in the realms of "expensive" - much like floppy disk drives before them, where the peripheral cost more than the computer it was attached to.

Nascom's serial Imp printer - one of the first affordable "small" printers to reach the market[source: "The Nascom Range", YC, March 1982, p. 21] - was at the cheaper end of the scale, coming in at about £375 including VAT, or about [[375|1980]] in [[now]] money. 

This compared, perhaps unfavourably, to the price of the Nascom-1 to which it could attach - available for only £160 ([[160|1980]]) - or even the newer Nascom-2, which was £340.

[picture: nascom_sys80_pcw_apr80.webp|The IMP printer featured in the Nascom System 80 bundle, which included an actual fibre-glass housing which could take the Nascom board as well as four expansion cards.  A fully-specced system with printer, 48K RAM, his-res colour card, 5¼" floppy disk drive, Nascom 2 microprocessor board and extra ROM firmware came in at £1,991, or about [[1991|1980]] in [[now]].  You'd still need to buy a monitor to go with it.]

Elsewhere in the same edition of Personal Computer World that this advert appeared in, Parameterised Computer Systems was offering an otherwise standard (albeit with an IEEE interface) dot-matrix printer for the more business-oriented Commodore PET for £550 - an eye-watering [[550|1980]] in [[now]][source: "Pet Printer", Personal Computer World, January 1980, p. 36]. 

Compared to that, the price for the Nascom printer was a complete bargain as it had the added bonus of being already built.

