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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."'"
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.
620K RAM + a 20Gig hard drive, there's an odd system.
Was there any non-mainframe computer that could use that little memory with that large of a disk?
Or did you me 20Meg?
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
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.
>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!
Snot-nosed punk.
The acoustic coupler was the cradle into which you inserted the telephone handset so the modem could use the speaker and microphone to acoustically transmit the data. We still have some around my place of business and they still work and are in occasional use. See how your high-falutin' iPhone works 40 years from now.
One thing you also might not be aware of is that at the time, you couldn't OWN a telephone - they all belonged to ATT/Ma Bell. In fact that was more-or-less true into the late 70's/early 80s. And they were all identical designs (actually there were two different designs but completely standardized) so your coupler would work with any of them.
Brett
Damn kid. You made me break my self-imposed rule of not clicking through to computerworld's ad-impression inflation articles, and I come back to find that my fellow old fogies have given you a good schoolin' on what an acoustic coupler is anyway. Remember, all phones (in the US at least) back in the day were made by the Western Electric division of AT&T (the real AT&T, not the rebranded SBC), and so it was easy to know just what size and shape to make those rubber cups.
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
Do you remember back when everyone was friends?
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http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/Newsweek/p01
My dad still has a copy of BYTE with this advertisement (or one very like it). In my memory it also had Steve Jobs, but I guess I was mistaken.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
ZModem was faster on the average. Because it allowed you to continue downloading if you had a disconnection. Which at the time was common problem. So even if Ymodem-G could take an extra Minute per Megabyte. The fact that you didn't have to wast an other hour to download the file again was appealig. When I started to use the Internet normally FTPed on my remote terminal (over the ISP's T1 Line) then I used ZModem to download the file because using SLIP to FTP it directly which may be overall faster I would normally get a disconnect midway and need to download it all over again.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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