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."'"

Comments

That was when...

[WED Fan]

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.

Re:That was when...

[WED Fan]

Right on! Real hackers prefer to pay for magazines with a tiny predetermined set of information. Only lusers and n00bs read stuff online for free.

<BackInMyDayRant>Hey, kiddo, :), back then, there was no "online" unless you were at a University or the time-share budget was gold. And when you were "online" it wasn't this nice wizbang WWW stuff. Back then, you were desperately trying to squeeze code AND data into 4k (or if you were lucky, you could write code to bank switch 16k). You had to get your timing right to get the phone into the acoustic cups, and Gods forbid you had a slim-line phone that didn't work well, or someone would fire up a vacuum cleaner and interfere with the modem noise. And you prayed that your paper tape would last through one more read because you were always too lazy to run another dump, or the department ran out of blank stock. And "hacking" was building or altering your own hardware to make it work with other hardware. It wasn't the script attack Angelina Jollie movie version.</BackInMyDayRant>

Another fun project from the day: Building your own keyboard. Why? Because your computer didn't have one. Don't forget, you had to wire wrap the interface for it as well. That was fun, none of this, "Why doesn't the manufacturer include Linux drivers?" business. But, then, I drove a Vega, had a silk shirt and white belt, had long hair, had a puka shell necklace, the Moody Blues had broken up, Ford was a President who couldn't stay on his feet. Movies like "Drive In" and "Car Wash" were funny, "Jaws" was scary, and it wasn't 5-25-77 yet.

Memory Lane

[smudge]

Wow ... this was such a trip down memory lane!

My kids think I'm a dinosaur when I say things like "we didn't have: cell phones | vcrs | ipods | personal computers | digital cameras ... when I was a kid." Now I look at these ads and see the advances in 'technology' in my WORKING lifetime.

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 ... like a DOS prompt or X screen.

          Maybe they're right.

Re:I would kill for one of those!

[Brett Buck]

>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

ClueBAT!!!!!

[LWATCDR]

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.

Not so shocking to me...

[MS-06FZ]

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"...