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The Good Old Days.....

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the up-up-down-down dept.

gr8fulnded writes: "How many of you remember seeing some of these old computer ads?" I'm not sure whether to file this under humor or technology. I can imagine looking at a G4 Cube ad 20 years from now, and comparing it with the then-current generation. "Gee Grandpa, did your computers really have wires?"

14 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Old Apple Commercials in Quicktime... by Dogcow · · Score: 3
    http://the.ausmac.net/ftp/Quicktime-Movies

    ftp://ftp.ausmac.net/pub/mac/Quicktime-Movies/

    Enjoy!

  2. and... by Barbarian · · Score: 3

    And back then, we didn't have to give the government our encryption keys and access codes and passwords. And we didn't have to watch the 2 minute hate every day or salute big brother when in public. And we could turn the TV OFF!

  3. old Amiga ad by Barbarian · · Score: 3

    Six years ago, when I was in high school, in the computer room, there was an ancient (like 1987) poster on the wall for the Amiga -- some women wearing tight clothing and clutching a joystick figured prominently...I assume by now the poster's gone .. even then it was pushing the limits of p.c.

  4. Bill Gates by batobin · · Score: 3

    "You mean, Bill Gates used to be an actual human before he transformed himself into a child-eating cyborg robot? Wow!" --My grandson, 50 years from now

    1. Re:Bill Gates by the+dweeb · · Score: 3
      Speaking of Bill...

      The headline testimonial in this ad refers to the May '83 issue of Byte Magazine, which, by odd coincidence, I had right in front of me in a little stack of obsolete literature keeping my monitor at a comfortable height. Curious, I turned to the referenced page 34 of the mag and found the glowing words of praise just as they appeared in the advertisement. This is not the interesting bit. What I found amusing was the closing paragraph of the article:
      "Radio Shack could probably make money issuing just a mediocre portable computer. Instead, it produced an exceptional machine. The designers of this machine--including Bill Walters of Radio Shack, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and several others at both companies--should be congratulated. And I have a feeling they will be--all the way to the bank."

      It's past 4am and I'm kind of tired, so you'll have to add your own Microsoft/Bill Gates/Radio Shack joke here.

    2. Re:Bill Gates by PyRoNeRd · · Score: 3
      Bill Gates wrote the editor of the TRS-80, according to "Gates" by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews (Touchstone 1994, ISBN 0-671-88074-8).

      On p.209 it sez:

      Squirreled away in Bellevue, the lead programmers were three ASCII Microsoft employees from Japan: Jey Suzuki, Rick Yamashita, and Jun Hayashi, whose names later turned up in the ROM. But there was also the handiwork of William Henry Gates, who designed the machine's data structures and some of the user interface.

      Later, Bill became impatient with the lame line-oriented text editor that had been developed for the machine. The programmers insisted a change was impossible; with all the other goodies in the 32K ROM, there just wouldn't be room enought for a full-screen text editor. The next morning Gates had delivered the "impossible" editor in the same amount of code as the rudimentary one. It would be the last time Gates wrote a program that shipped as a Microsoft product. The demands of business has inexorably become more compelling than mere codesmithing.

      So this was Gates swansong as a programmer and he made it into a fine product that is STILL being used by many journalists.

      It goes against the grain of the popular image of Gates as a greedy businessman who profiteers from other's work and doesn't contribute anything himself but apparently Bill Gates was a competent programmer in his time.

  5. An interesting trend by nakaduct · · Score: 3
    About a year ago, I was talking to a friend of mine how hardware is getting better and simpler every year.

    When you buy a PC today, the specs include memory and CPU and not much else. We're pretty close to the day where CPU won't matter for personal workstations (my P200, now almost 3 Moore-generations old, is still a highly usable NT machine; until last year I did most of my coding on a Linux P90 with 12 VC's). The web is accelerating this trend, since any machine that can run 10 browser windows will always be useful.

    Memory is similarly stagnating; unless you work with Photoshop or its ilk, chances are you have no use for >256MB.

    Anyway, my prediction at that time was within five years, the only spec on a new desktop PC will be the screen size; you'll buy a 20" PC or a 35" PC, and not care about what's inside. A month later, Viewsonic conveniently propped up my assertion with a campaign pointing out all PC's are the same; the only differentiator is the monitor (they favored Viewsonic monitors for the best PC experience).

    Looking at these ads, you can see the trend vividly -- the IBM copy, for example, has a box of tiny type listing the diagnostic capabilities, the printer port speed, and a dozen other things no one would care about today.

    In fact, all of the really successful computers have tons o'specs. Most of the ones touting usability, etc. without benefit of hard numbers were flops.

    We live in exciting times.

    cheers,
    mike

  6. What? No Atari XL? by Whelkman · · Score: 3

    The Atari 800XL was my portal to technology. I owe much of what I am today to that wonderful device. While everybody else was just playing video games with their Atari 2600s, I was learning how to interface with computers and how to program in BASIC.

    And the games. I had over 300 games for my 800XL. Sure most of them were crappy as can be, but they were fun.

    And the old Ataris even had voice synthesis! Man, how long did it take PCs to get that?

    Man, I loved my old Atari. One of the worst days of my life was when my mom threw it away while I was at school. She told me "I didn't use it anymore," when all that happened was the disk drive broke the week before. Oh well.

    A few months later I got an 8086 with the "full" 640K of RAM and when I heard how fast and how much RAM it had, I surely thought it would make my puny 64K Atari look like junk. Boy, was I disappointed. It had text only monochrome graphics and WordPerfect 5.1. Yeah, WP beat the pants off of Atari's Word Processor, but the machine was no fun at all.

    A few years later I got a 386. Surely a 25 Mhz "monster" with 2MB of RAM and VGA graphics would beat the crap out of the Atari, right? Nope. It wasn't until my Pentium 90 did I enjoy computers as much as I enjoyed the ancient Atari.

  7. 20 years is a loooong time... by AcidMonkey · · Score: 3
    ...in computer years.

    I think the astonished youth is more likely to ask "Your computers were really visible to the naked eye?" or "...required external power sources?" or maybe "...didn't rule the world as harsh yet fair despots?"

    --


    Got Warez?

  8. Computer Ads in 1958 Scientific American by Mignon · · Score: 4
    I bought a 1958 Scientific American recently and was fascinated by the ads as much as the articles. Many were for missle-related technology - the space program hadn't really gotten off the ground yet (he-he) - but there were a few computer ads as well.

    Perkin-Elmer was one such company advertising back then. We had a laugh at work because until recently, they still used those beasts there. Because they never rewrite code when we change platforms, only port it, there's a routine called PEKLUDGE() which must be called. Nobody ever claims to understand what it does anymore.

    I remember some detail of one ad - it was comparing one company's product to the competition and described how it had some 512 bytes of memory and could perform something on the order of a few hundred operations per second. And I think they boasted that it could use the new punch-card technology to input programs...

    I gave the issue to a friend who was born that month, but I think I'm going to borrow it and put up a page with some of the ads on it. Email me if you're interested in the URL when it's available.

  9. Yep yep by ericdano · · Score: 4

    And they had cables, and disks that spun around and everything........
    --

    --
    It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
    I moderate therefore I rule!
    --
  10. Old computer ads? by AntiNorm · · Score: 4

    Here is a *really* old one.

    ---
    cat /dev/random > /dev/hda3

    --

    I pledge allegiance to the flag...
    of the Corporate States of America...
  11. 20 years from now? by Bill+Fuckin'+Gates · · Score: 4
    In the spirit of Conan O'Brian's "In the year 2000" sketch:

    In the year 2020...

    • Intel will produce a stable 1.4GHz CPU. AMD, long the market leader, will buy it from them out of pity. In a surprise twist, Cyrix outlasts Intel through the sales of their Via chipsets for AMD mainboards.
    • Netscape 7 will be released. It is expected to dutifully follow Andreson's Law ("The lifespan of Netscape browsers will double with each successive release.") and isn't suspected to reach EOL until the end of the millenium.
    • Alan Cox will awaken from a five-year alcohol induced blackout to discover he has become Chief Scientist at Sybase. He promptly vomits on Tesla.
    • The average desktop PC will have more power in its GPU than its CPU.
    • John Carmack will enter an "experimental" stage, leaving id to create a new software company which shuns such outmoded concepts as "gameplay" in favor of sheer graphical excellence. Music fans will recognize that "experimental" is a buzzword meaning "poor sales". Carmack's new company will produce a series of mildly successful screensavers.
    • Steve Jobs will have fulfilled his childhood dream of becoming a pirate.
    • Apple will release a 700MHz G4, which because of its amazing Altivec graphics subsystem, "remains competitive" with the 20GHz Athlon Firebird.
    • The US Trade Commission approves the merger of Microsoft Applications Development Ltd. and Microsoft Systems Incorporated, reuniting the innovative software juggernaut tragically split by the Department of Evil^H^H^H^H"Justice" in 2002.
    • According to this post, I will be a child-eating cyborg robot.
    • Online messageboards will experience a Goatse.cx renaissance.
    • Linux 2.4 will be released RSN.



    See you in hell,
    Bill Fuckin' Gates®.
    --


    See you in hell,
    Bill Fuckin' Gates®.
    (This post is ©2001 Microsoft(TM) Corporation.)
  12. 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE. by Admiral+Burrito · · Score: 5

    A complete, state of the art home PC for under $600. (Commodore 64, graet little machine.) Gee, we're having a hard time getting that NOW, 20 years later, even with inflation.

    With the C64 it was common convention to prefix hexadecimal numbers with a $ instead of the now more common "0x". So $600 was decimal 1536. A location which, if you (POKE|ST[AXY])'ed it, you could make a character appear at a certain place on the text screen. That's because $0400-$07E7 (inclusive) was by default used to store the 40x25 text screen. The colour information was stored elsewhere though, at $D800-$DBE7. After the screen memory was a few bytes related to the eight graphic sprites (but you had to poke at the video chip registers in the $D000 range to actually make the sprites appear). And right after that came $0800, which was the start of BASIC program memory space, which extended all the way up to $A000 (which was the start of the BASIC interpreter ROM unless you fiddled with $0001 to unmask the RAM that was there). That's 38912 bytes, which when you exclude the zero byte at $0800 gives you the "38911" in the "38911 BASIC BYTES FREE." message that appeared when you turned the computer on.

    Just a little arcane knowledge I thought I would share.