A government physics laboratory in Teddington near London on a grey morning, on a pale laboratory bench between a grey oscilloscope and a rack of instrument cases a small flat computer of white plastic twenty-two by nineteen centimetres with a shallow horizontal groove across it, bundles of thin red horizontal lines at its upper left and below the groove, forty small black rubber keys, every key plain, smooth and unmarked, tiny white plastic rivets along its sides, a small black and white monitor glowing soft even grey, a scientist seen from directly behind, face turned fully away, one hand in a white laboratory coat sleeve typing, rain on a tall window.
What it was used for
Home computer from Jupiter Cantab, founded by Richard Altwasser and Stephen Vickers. Altwasser had worked on the ZX Spectrum's hardware at Sinclair, Vickers on its BASIC ROM at Nine Tiles (Centre for Computing History). Z80A at 3.25 MHz, 8 KB ROM, 3 KB RAM expandable to 49 KB; a television as display, a cassette recorder as storage. Price 89.95 pounds. The example in the Centre for Computing History's collection is dated 22 September 1982.
What was new
Unlike home computers with BASIC in ROM, the Ace had Forth as its built-in language. Forth was, per nosher.net, significantly faster than BASIC, at around 80 percent of machine-code speed; that is the speed advantage Jupiter Cantab advertised in Your Computer in September 1982 under the headline "Probably the fastest computer in the universe". The barb: the Centre for Computing History names that very choice of Forth, alongside weak graphics and sound, as the reason the machine stayed in a niche. Around 8,000 are reported sold before Jupiter Cantab closed.
What the sources leave open: The figure of about 8,000 is given by the Centre for Computing History itself as a report ("reportedly"); no primary source for it was found. The page gives no closure date for Jupiter Cantab. The advertisement exists only as an image; what is quoted here is the headline as nosher.net renders it.