Solve the "Which microcomputer to buy" puzzle in six easy moves

There's nothing quite like an advert without a photo of the thing you're selling to really promote it, although this one does at least feature a custom Rubik's cube. 

That's maybe because this appears to be just another "beige box" IBM-a-like, and judging by most of the other clones being released at the time, if you've seen one you've seen 'em all. 

[picture: zen_dealer_percw_dec82.jpg|A pre-released advert for Zen Microcomputer's mystery IBM-compatible PC, possibly also called Zen, either after a branch of Chinese Bhuddism or the ship's computer in legendary 1970s TV series Blake's 7. It shows the possibly-garbled iAPX 186/8086 microprocessor designation in the otherwise-standard specification. From PCW, December 1982]

The Zen had a fairly standard spec, although it advertised its CPU as being the iAPX 186/8086[source: PCW, December 1982, p. 213]. iAPX was a short-lived way that Intel used to describe its Advanced Performance Architecture - a term which didn't even work when condensed to an initialism and which apparently confused even Intel's own technical authors[source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAPX]. 

It's likely referring to the relatively rare 80186, although there's an outside chance that it could be referring to the 8086 - the 16-bit-data-bus version of the 8088 that was used in the original IBM PC. 

The 80186 was hardware-incompatible with the popular 8086/8088 series, and so was largely ignored by PC manufacturers who were waiting for the 80286, released in 1982.

In a pre-release advert in December 1982's PCW, Zen Microcomputers the company didn't seem to know how much it was going to sell its machine for, as it was suggesting "circa £1,400 + VAT", or around £1,610. that's about [[1610|1983]] in [[now]].