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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."'"
Sorry, the 3Dfx "We have in our possession a chip..." commercials (example, and see the Related Videos for the other two) are far and away the best computer ads ever.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
>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
And, you probably remember, Radio Shack was the place to get all the parts you needed, and the guy behind the counter knew how to building an oscillator and could look at your hand drawn schematic and know what it was you were doing.
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.
Oh, sorry, nurse says its time for my meds and a then I get to sit in the garden.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.