Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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?"

5 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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!
    --
  3. 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...
  4. 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.)
  5. 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.