A Minstrel 4 eight-user package - £15,564 complete It's often said that the rise of cheap commodity PCs and affordable networking killed off the multi-user system, but it's still here in 1987 in the form of Hotel Microsystems' Minstrel 4. Hotel Microsystems - or HM Systems PLC as it was now known - appeared to originate from a division of reseller Guestel, which - clue's in the name - specialised in micro systems for hotels. Its first product - the Minstrel (later Minstrel 1) was a fairly straight-up Z80-based multi-user system on an S-100 bus, which made a thing out of its compatibility with North Star's systems. The Minstrel 4 of the advert maintains the multi-user approach, but it's on steroids - although each Minstrel computer could host up to 16 users - with their own dedicated processors - they could themselves be networked with other Minstrels to offer up to 4080 simultaneous users, and a frankly surreal 4080 printers. The system - which included an Oki laser printer - retailed for £15,465 + VAT, which is about [[17784|1987]] in [[now]]. That was for eight users - the full 16 would be an additional £10,074, or [[10074|1987]] now. In common with such expensive systems, it was popular in the UK's public sector, where most of the company's 4,000 installations by 1988 seemed to have ended up[source: https://techmonitor.ai/technology/hm_systems_looks_to_millenium_with_20mhz_80286_to_double_its_sales].