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Hilarious Antique IT Advertisements
PetManimal writes "Computerworld has gone back through forty years worth of magazines, and came up with some entertaining IT-related advertising gems from decades past. Highlights include The Personal Mainframe, an image of the earliest screenless briefcase portables, and Elvira hawking engineering software. From the article: 'Remember Elvira, Mistress of the Dark? Besides appearing on TV in features like Elvira's Movie Macabre Halloween Special, Elvira also invited Computerworld readers to "cut through paper-based CASE [computer-aided software engineering] methods with LBMS" software. "The scariest thing about CASE is the several hundred pounds of books that land on your desk and for which you've paid fifteen gazillion dollars, when you buy off on a CASE development methodology," she writes. Can you guess what year Elvira appeared in this Computerworld ad? Headline hint: "IBM delays notebook arrival in U.S."'"
"LBMS - Provably the Best CASE in the World"?? Oy carumba ... not that anyone would have taken their eyes off Elvira to read that part.
man and woman on the couch, soft music playing she look into his eyes and says...
"Can I see your Wang?"
Damned best computer Ad ever... and it was pulled because it was too sexual.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
when I was 10 years old and playing dig dug on my IBM personal computer!
is here
Why do you people keep doing this?
This signature has Super Cow Powers
That was when magazines were cool, you could learn Pascal, BASIC, and Assembly in one magazine because they had tons of listings. Hell, I remember using several articles to wire wrap my own S100 serial card.
Ah, the good ol' days. When hackers were hackers.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Windows + Security, I don't know why, but it always comes out funny
Well... when I re-think about it... I know why.
Read and Comment at my BLOG
!!!
Um...1991? (Check the "copyright" at the bottom of the image.) Jeez.
Old technology pwns!
Learn from the past a bit now that we're on the subject.
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
It was actually a 20 meg hardrive. Sorry for the mistake.
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
"Worried about software costs? People who use it say The Personal Mainframe is the easiest system they have ever worked with. The DBMS complies with COASYL specifications. All the languages, from COBOL to FORTRAN are highly interactive".
I should lay that one on my fiancee next time she complains about something being wrong with the PC.
I remember when blazing fast 1200 baud modems came out, and I replaced my 300 baud modem. The text (there were no graphics to be concerned about) would scroll by so fast that I couldnt read it. I figured there was really no need for faster modems than 300 baud, because I couldnt read faster than 300 baud anyway. Guess thats my version of the "No one needs more than 640K Memory" quote.
Marketing dept guy #1 : How the hell are we going to sell this LBMS?
: Hmm.. Our customers are all sexually frustrated geeks. Let's put Elvira(R) on there. She's sexy and the kids seem to like her.
: That's a great idea.
: "The most overwhelming aspect of CASE is the several hundred...LBMS will address these issues. Their Project Engineer(TM) and On-line Method(TM) toolsets will reduce development backlog."
: Wow, that sounds boring as hell. It'd sound way cooler if we made Elvira(R) say it. Try this :
... heh heh ...Texas. Let them show you how their totally automated Project Engineer(TM) and On-Line Method(TM) toolsets can cut through development backlog." signed, Elvira(R)
: You're a genius. That sounds way more interesting. I've got wood.
Marketing dept guy #2
Marketing dept guy #1
(Marketing dept prepares a mock-up. Marketing dept guy #1 reads off the text)
Marketing dept guy #1
Marketing dept guy #2
"The scariest thing about CASE is the several hundred...So how's about calling LBMS in
Marketing dept guy #1
Elvira was better on TV. Especially her Halloween 3D special, long before she was syndicated.
Never underestimate the persistence of the pre-pubescent teen that has the ability to amuse themselves. Think 'fart sniffing' of the digital age.
;)
Yes, it's sad really. And nothing can be done to make them stop or go away. Respond, and you reinforce their immaturity. Don't respond and you reinforce their immaturity. Ignore and they'll try harder. Confront and they'll try harder still.
They're really just cries for 'mommy' after all. Poor lost souls
No Comment.
I may not have the wording exactly right (I think it was >25 years ago), but
PRIME computers happily talk to other computer systems. However, they sometimes have to talk slowly and use very short words.
Riker selling some software...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZVHm02FeCH8 has to be one of the more hilarious old IT advertisements. I'm still not entirely sure what the heck it's selling but it involves Commander Riker using the Enterprise-D to reroute traffic through Cleveland because of a break in a token ring network, apparently.
No one will ever need more than 80Mb of ASCII porn
I remember seeing an ad for the IBM PS/1 when it came out as a successor to the PCjr marketed as a consumer-grade PS/1. The computer was sitting on a desk in the background wasting electricity and there was a family enjoying each others company in front of it, paying no attention to it at all. The ad had a tag line that I vaguely recall as "the first computer that knows you have a life" or something like that. I almost ran out and bought one but then I controlled myself and decided that if I could wait just a few more months I could buy a computer even worse.
Hi all. Computerworld's antique ads article is fun, but if you want more on the subject of vintage computing in general, then check out Computerworld's blog devoted to the topic! I write it; the link is http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/koblentz/
"Control unit, keyboard, acoustic coupler and 5" video monitor"
Apparently, by "acoustic coupler" they mean "telephone". Goes to show that bamboozling unsuspecting consumers with high-tech talk has been around as long as the technologies themselves!
The briefcase includes a 5-inch black and white monitor! Now that really is the ultimate in convenience!
Wow ... this was such a trip down memory lane!
... when I was a kid." Now I look at these ads and see the advances in 'technology' in my WORKING lifetime.
... like a DOS prompt or X screen.
My kids think I'm a dinosaur when I say things like "we didn't have: cell phones | vcrs | ipods | personal computers | digital cameras
In my 1st job at a VERY LARGE computer company we had "terminal rooms". For the youngsters that's a room with 10 typewriter like things that you could use to submit your code. (No screen, just test on PAPER.) Then wait the rest of the day to get a printout from another room. This was an improvement over the punch cards of the year before.
We eventual got tubes (terminals w/screen) in our offices, but usally 2 programmers per. And those had that lovely green on black text
Maybe they're right.
Well, not exactly WordStar. I grew up with WordStar on my Apple II+. Some years later when I started using Linux I found JOE (Joe's Own Editor.) I checked it out for the hell of it and was surprised how naturally all the WordStar commands came back to me. I've been using it ever since. It's not exactly WYSIWYG by today's standards, but it works great over SSH!
I'm not sure what the article said - I was busy trying to gouge my eyes out. What a terrible site.
Oh LOL and years 15 ago it cost a bomb to buy a mobile phone and some were BRICK SIZED!!11, 75 years ago guess what LOL Hardy was writing about lack of applicability of number theory as there was FFSBBQ NO STRONG CRYPTO!!, 300 years ago we omg even the concepts of mechanisation of reason and number theory hadn't yet been presented by Legendre.. oh oh 3000 years ago LOL NOT EVEN ARISTOTLEAN LOGIC OMG SO FUNNY. Are people so insular today that they find their context within history so surprising as to be hilarious?
an acoustic coupler was a device that you put on the phone head piece, to receive and transmit the audio signal, and transform them (back) into electrical signals for your modem, which didn't have that capability built into it.
http://opticaldynamics.com/~gbk/2c-a-byte.jpg
Up to 32k for the low low price of $649!
I still have in my possesion an ad that came with Microsoft Flight Simulator back in the late 80s/early 90s. It was an Intel 386/SX processor for nearly $1000. Just for the bloody chip! It's interesting that I can get a complete system for half that, now.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
...was a two-page advert from Sun, featuring Sally Struthers.
:D
The gist was something like, "Thinking of switching to NT? Isn't there enough suffering in the world?"
I'd LOVE to find out where that can be found online...
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
One word: Shitcock.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You both missed the real last line, and it's a beaut - on the ad, the _second_ tick box on the response form:
"[ ] I'd just like a glossy reprint of this ad."
Now _that_ is knowing you target audience...
Beautiful marketing - probably not even allowed these days.
My favorite ad was one I received in the mail from Genicom back in 1992 or 1993. It consisted of a medium-size green box with the following text on the front: "I dunno what happened. The printer was working just fine a minute ago". Open the box, and there was a real Stanley ball-peen hammer fastened inside, and "Deny everything" on the inside of the box lid. I still have the hammer, BTW. :-)
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I have a huge stack of old Byte magazines at home - I've been lugging them around since high school. Those were the best - they covered hobby computing, hardware, software, programming, you name it. The ads were also great.
Hmm... I came in here to brag, but now I suddenly just feel very old.
siener's youtube channel
Antique ads! Cool! I wasn't aware there were a lot of computers being advertised prior to 1907. Are these ads advertising the services of pools of women who can take on tasks such as counting the number of Sears and Roebuck catalogs that were shipped?
What was great back then is that the magazines would expose you to things you never would have looked at on your own. I first learned about Object Oriented Programing by reading the SmallTalk issue of Byte. I got interested in this really cool OS called Unix by reading about it in Byte. Yes Blogs can do the same thing now but let's face it 99.999% of all blogs are worth exactly what you pay for them.
Slashdot is the closest thing to Byte I have found in a while but it lacks the editorial control that Byte had. Just look at how many misleading head lines you get. That and Byte was just about computers and didn't have any political content.
I love the Internet for looking things up but yes I miss Byte.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
All IBM ads, are excellent, for many decades. Tv ads : The Universal Business Adapter, The valves, Linux, The bladecenter, the Reality Detector. Paper Ad 'Eye Bee M', and many more. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIOqOxI0K_I
That's 15 bytes or chars/sec, for 150 bits per second; I am assuming 8 data bits and two for overhead. If you type 150 wpm, then you can outtype a 300 baud modem. Outtasight! I'm at half that, so I only typed into the buffer in brief bursts.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...where a Prime computer told him to marry Lala Ward. I'm not sure which happened first - they split up or Prime went belly up, but I can't help but think that codependence on a buggy mainframe explains a lot.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"Radio Newsman Les Nessman Dead of Sudden Heart Attack, Magical Fairy-Dust Envelope Blamed"
The days of $12,000 80 MB hard drives and portable accoustic-coupler terminals are before my time - but not so far that the concepts seem completely alien. Accoustic couplers don't surprise me - I wanted one as a kid, but wound up getting a regular wired modem. I remember the time before internet e-mail was something I regularly used - when e-mail was something I could get only on BBSes, and therefore rather limited - so the idea of a time completely before e-mail doesn't surprise me either. And I remember when a 200 MB hard drive was a major investment - for me anyway - and before that when smaller hard drives than that were a big deal on a home computer.
Likewise the notion of a laptop computer with the power of a PC XT, or any kind of big, heavy "portable" computer - my dad had a Commodore SX 64 when I was a kid, and I used to dream of having a real C-64 laptop.
So probably this article has a much more potent effect on the kids who had internet e-mail when they were ten years old or younger, don't remember operating systems prior to Windows 95, never saw an Apple IIe or IIc... It's interesting stuff but it's not "hilarious"...
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
oh wait, you probably dont get that reference either....
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
...so 80 MB for under $12K indeed sounds good. Actually, 10 MB for $12,500 sounded pretty good because it was the brand-new just-out replacement for the previous model, which was 10 MB for $22,000 or thereabouts.
It was the drive for a Datacraft 6024/5. The department only had a budget of about $30 or $40,000 for the thing, and we were very excited about the chance to get an actual disk drive and stay under budget... we'd been afraid we'd have to do it all with magnetic tape.
The 10 MB consisted of a removable top-loading disk pack and an internal fixed disk, each capable of storing 5 MB. Those 5 MB disk packs cost something like $100 or $150 each. This would have been in the early 1970s...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I should know, I had one -- an Omnitec 701B acoustic coupler, bought in 1976 for $350. Sometime around 1979-80 I upgraded it to a 1200 Baud GDC modem for $750.
JOE also handles very large files correctly. If I open a 10M logfile with JOE, it is fast because it doesn't seem chuck the entire thing into a buffer. It seems to know how to pull just the bit you're working on from the disk. I'd love a good graphical editor that works this way.
They have an ad for a KL10 DECSYSTEM-20; I have a KS10 in my living room.
It still runs like the day it was shipped, unlike most of the PCs I have bought over time...
They don't make em like they used to!
Slashdot is treated by most people as a virtual dumpster. They come here to throw in garbage. It's just that some garbage is more popular than others. The GNAA posts serve no purpose, but then neither do all the irrational, repetitive anti-MS, anti-Bush, anti-younameit rants, of which there are a thousand times more of. At least the former category can be filtered out, but the multitudes of the latter cannot, because they get modded up. In summary, "hey I'm frosty piss" posts are worthless, and the GNAA posts are worthless and hurtful, but they are the least of this site's neuroses.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
No it's just hilarious when you still use operating systems prior to Windows 95. Part of it results from retarded vendor lock in which you have to spend large amounts of money to get new software that does the same as the DOS program we have running in Windows 3.1. There is a laser CNC machine which only works with a computer with an operating system that predates DOS.
Ehhhh.. Bought three of those at an auction (Why was it a part of a lot of useful items? I really don't know.) They are heavy but not as heavy as I expected.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Is there a copy of this advertisement online?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPRxx2r61iA
Vandyke's CRT and SecureCRT, and SyncTERM have Z-Modem support. I still use rz and sz commands in these clients to upload and download off Linux and UNIX systems. It beats scp.exe, sftp, etc. AND I can resume too. I wished PuTTY would add it, but they won't so far.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
> Now, its some snot that doesn't want to help you find a pot because he makes more money selling cell phones to geezers who don't need them.
I was going to argue with you. I think some of them could help you find pot, but then I realized that you meant a pot[entiometer].
But yeah, I had one of them write on my receipt "not recommended" and say that they would refuse any returns because I wanted to replace my 12V 250mA AC adapter with the 12V 1A they carried, and even worse, I was able to figure out which tip to get on my own without bringing in the old adapter. But these are people who told me that Monster cable was a "good" brand when I was desperate enough to actually get one of their power strips (it later managed to trip our circuit breaker when I plugged it in).
Never mind that I'd put in a few years in the Electrical Engineering program, knew that it wasn't going to draw any more current than it needed to, etc. What really irks me, though, is that when I was looking for a part-time job back in college, they never even gave me a call back. They wanted good salesmen, not knowledgeable people, apparently. Ironically, I won all the crappy sales awards at the place I eventually found a job at...
So basically, we need to hunt them down, break their fingers, shoot them in the knees and then gut them and leave them to dry in the sun. I'm in.... :)
That's a terrible web site. At a resolution of 1024 x 768 I got one small picture and 52 words of the article. Everything else was ads. I think I'll pass on that one, thanks.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
I still have my dataproducts line printer and it still works just fine - 300 lpm and serial interface. I ran it off my PC before lasers came out.
Anyone interested... it does multipart forms!
...DRM will ensure that the ads of today won't be around to laugh at.
In the ad: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9024559
Does the little asterisk means the price is:
Case A:
80MB HDrive for 12000$, for a minimum of 40 systems;
300MB HDrive for 20000$, for a minimum of 69 systems;
Case B:
40x 80MB HD for a total of 12000$, totalling 300$ each;
69x 300MB HDrive for a total of 20000$, totalling ~290$ each.
Any idea?
Blame Canada!
Wow. What a trip.
Reminds me of our humble technological past. My desktop machine IS a "Personal Mainframe," even though it's not state-of-the-art by any means.
I can see the logic of an IBM Selectric typewriter with the Datatype with DF-2 sticking barcodes above human-readable english so that it can be scanned: Remember, this was long before the Microsoft revolution; Innovation was the rule before we all converged on "standard" thinking.
This is a catalyst in a way. I feel like it has some of the same texture of the movie "Moog", in which the director conveys a beautiful sense of entrprenuerial spirit of the '70s. Although the movie speaks of the roots of synthesized music, I can't help but to think that it says a whole lot more about the tipping point of technology as we know it today.
Adam and the Apple
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
How about this one with William Shatner himself pitching a Vic-20
I keep expecting him to burst out with a "Khaaann!" at any moment...
Owww! It Hertz!
You guys and girls, writing using your keyboards, most of your PCs having only 2 GB of RAM and 250GB hd capacity and 2 core-CPUs are making fun of something which is only slightly less advanced than your technology. Just you reach my time and you'll see what advancement means.
-You don't have to type.
-2 GB is RAM most toasters have. The RAM of our PCs is not measured in GB. Infact PCs aren't what you think they are. Modern PCs are almost sentient machines with brain-like capacities without its disadvantages. You don't need to type (or think) http://slashdot.org/ to go to this site (site? what a quaint concept!) The "need" of a human automatically causes the PC to access the information that is required.
But dammit, do something about the SPAM, now....
- A time traveller from 2013.
I loved the Honeywell ads which had photos of sculptures of animals made of hundreds of electronic components. A lot of these were on the back covers of Scientific American.
Where do I sign up?
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Oh my, those are some hilarious ads! Of course, it's all in retrospect. We all remember internal DVD-rom drives costing $5,000 back in the day. It's always like that but it was nice to actually see & read some of the ole sk00l ads from ComputerWorld.
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. -Mahatma Ghandi
Back around 1990 we got an ad in the mail for a product (presumably a VMS database book) called "RMS Expert"!
Even funnier -- our marketing director got the joke!
(ob explanation to avoid whooshing sounds: in the "ol days" RMS was a kind of VMS structured file, Stallman was not an international celebrity and people thought we were loons for trying to make a business around software we gave away).
That site is horrid. I could hardly find the joke adds among all of the regular ads and popups and requests to complete surveys.
/. should have a policy against pointing to such crapilicious sites.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.