CompuStar: Tough to outgrow

Here's a nice advert for InterTec's CompuStar, which makes it look like the terminal-looking thing in the foreground is the most important part of the system.

In this case, it was, sort of, which was unusual for a multi-user system at the time, many of which had centralised processing accessed via dumb terminals.

CompuStar was a mixed system in that the "intelligent terminals" had their own processing power, with two Z80 processors in each terminal, as well as their own floppy disk storage.

The floating box in the background - the second part of the system - was mostly about sharing what was at the time very expensive hard disk storage, with 10MB, 96MB and 144MB options.

Intertec eventually renamed itself as Wells American in 1985, named after Ron Wells, the brother of Intertec's founder William, who took over the company after some serious financial problems. 

Wells American released an updated [=wellsamerican_compustar_percw_jul89|CompuStar], which was followed by a CompuStar II towards the end of 1989.