Vintage computer ads

I&#x27;m so grateful my father (RIP) came home with a Commodore VIC-20 from Sears in 1983.<p>We were incredibly poor, so my mother nearly killed him, but he insisted that personal computers were here to stay, and that his children needed to become acquainted.<p>Nearly 40 years later, he was right. I have made, and continue to make, a great living on these crazy machines.

<i>By the time the 1980s came to an end, it was unusual for a household to be without a personal computer.</i><p>Only fifteen percent of American households had a computer in 1990.

Something that I often find frustrating about modern technology is how little we do with the vast amounts of processing power we have. A lot of what we are doing now - word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing - was done by machines with a fraction of the computing power two decades ago. What does it matter if the numbers get bigger if the use cases are the same?

The article focuses almost entirely on hardware especially hardware prices.<p>Then there&#x27;s the usual confusion about inflation. In a theoretical sense a $3K hard drive would be like spending $9K now, but with massive economic decline and income inequality the real comparison is in the 80s families could scare up $3K if they really wanted, but now people can only afford $1K phones with exotic high interest rate financing, so people were either three times richer back then or nine times richer back then. Either way times are not good now. The point of an ad for a $3K hard drive from the 80s is not that it would in some theoretical sense cost $9K now or would store a million times as much data now, but that short decades ago people could afford to spend $3K and now they&#x27;re stressed at spending merely $300. Another few decades of permanent economic decline and we as a people will be stressed at spending only $30.<p>Most of the consumer-level ads try to link their product with success and intelligence, whereas all advertisements now focus on competitively showing off your former wealth or some variation on &quot;We are woke so our products must be good&quot; LOL. Tech ads in 2022 look a lot more like mechanical gold watch ads in the 70s or designer jeans ads from the 80s.<p>The other point missed in the article is computer mags from my youth were absolutely chock full of software advertisements for $1000 compilers and $500 word processor and spreadsheet software. When I was a little kid a nice C compiler cost about half my dad&#x27;s car, then as a teen you could get a decent K+R compatible compiler for a hundred bucks from radio shack (I paid 50 on sale using money I saved) and as a young adult, development tools are all free and you download linux and emacs and start writing code for the cost of some bbs download time, and later internet download time. Most of the software that we take for granted as being free today in 2022 used to sell for at least hundreds of dollars in the 80s and at least $50 in the early 90s, then the internet hit and you just download gcc &quot;for free&quot;.

My favorite is from 1969.<p>The friendly RCA computer monster, the octoputer and the octopeeper product.<p>There&#x27;s an entire campaign with this creature. There&#x27;s even vintage mugs for sale<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;file.vintageadbrowser.com&#x2F;o3yyp9bbfn25fj.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;file.vintageadbrowser.com&#x2F;o3yyp9bbfn25fj.jpg</a><p>Here it is when a &quot;younger brother&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;live.staticflickr.com&#x2F;2936&#x2F;14696676103_bdb77a4827_b.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;live.staticflickr.com&#x2F;2936&#x2F;14696676103_bdb77a4827_b....</a><p>Surrounded by its users <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;EflEFwMU0AAN58C?format=png&amp;name=large" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;EflEFwMU0AAN58C?format=png&amp;name=...</a><p>Slaying bugs <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pingdom.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;octoputer.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pingdom.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;octoputer...</a><p>And winning the computer room <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;EflFX5CUwAAhira?format=jpg&amp;name=large" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;EflFX5CUwAAhira?format=jpg&amp;name=...</a>

The oldest and most mind-boggling process ever devised and foisted upon readers lies at the bottom of many of those ads -- &quot;circle ### on reader service card.&quot;<p>It was a cruel joke for the ad to spark your interest whereby you would circle the number, mail in the bingo card to the publisher (3-5 days), whose lead management group would process it (3-5 days), then send the lead to the company or dealer (3-5 days), who would assign it to a sales rep (3-5 days), who was working their leads and getting back to potential customers (3-5 days), who would then ignore the call because they had lost interest in the product or couldn&#x27;t remember requesting information.<p>Compare that with today where making a phone call to the sales team takes too long (3-5 minutes) and it&#x27;s easier to just go get the damn information yourself.

Those ads really take me back. I had a college friend tell me in 1974 that everyone would have a computer on their desk by 1984. We ruthlessly mocked him for it. But in 1983 I got a computer on my desk at the fertilizer plant. There was zero software for the fertilizer industry at the time. So I started with Lotus 123 and taught myself the macro language and set out to create it.<p>Then I convinced my boss to buy me a copy of dBase II and set out to learn that as well. I was spending every work night until 11 pm. Got tired of that so I withdrew $3500 out of my meager savings and bought an IBM XT clone from a new company in Flint. I remember adding a modem so that I could explore CompuServe, a large mainframe based online service by H &amp; R Block.

I miss those days. I feel like back then computers naturally encouraged exploration and learning. There was no internet, or even modems in most cases, so there was no alternative but exploration - trying to figure out what all you could do with this strange piece of hardware.<p>I&#x27;m not entirely sure I&#x27;m just jaded by time - I feel like maybe computers became commodity appliances, for an entirely different crowd, but I stayed the same.

This article makes me nostalgic. Sometime in 1994 or 1995, my immigrant dad bought us a Packard Bell machine. He couldn’t afford it, and I’m not sure what drove him to make the purchase. I do know he used a credit card, couldn’t make the payments, and it was one of a few purchases that destroyed his credit.<p>This thing sat in its cardboard packaging for at least 6-9 months. My dad had no idea how to set it up, and his English wasn’t good enough to just read the manual I guess. When I was in first grade, one of my dads friends came over and helped my dad set it up. They installed AOL. My dad gave my older sibling the password but wouldn’t share tell me.<p>The first time I used the computer, I spent a good hour I think staring at Mighty Morphin Power Rangers content on the “Kids Only” AOL channel.<p>This literally changed my life. I learned HTML when I was in the 3rd grade. The next year, I learned PHP because all of the cool Quake 3 clans had web pages where you could post updates without having to change HTML and re upload files over FTP. By 5th grade, all the cool people on IRC (Dalnet or EFNet I think) were talking about object oriented PHP.<p>I learned how to write objects in PHP, although OOP didn’t really make sense to me. I remember using some library to add my Quake 3 clan’s logo as a watermark on images I would upload to our website.<p>As a kid growing up in the 1990s with both of my parents being alive then, it was truly a different time. I believed I could accomplish just about anything. By 1999&#x2F;2000, I knew I’d wanted to do something with computers when I grew up. By 2001&#x2F;2002, I was poking around in Java a bit. Unfortunately I didn’t really learn much computer science until college. And I didn’t really appreciate data structures and design until really starting my career.<p>Sometimes I do wonder how things could have been different if I was born in the 70s or 80s.

Who still has their first computer? My TRS-80 Color Computer 2 is sitting quietly in my garage, in a box that contains it, the TV adapter, the Color Basic manuals, a Radio Shack joystick and a half dozen cassette tapes with programs I wrote as an 10yo in 1982.<p>If anyone at the Computer History Museum reads this: Get the 70s&#x2F;80s micro computers out from behind the display cases!!! CHM has at least one of every computer you can think of, why not take the extras and put them on the floor for visitors to play with? It&#x27;s like torture wandering through the displays and not being able to <i>play</i> with all those computers and video games you lusted over as a kid.

Victor Borge in his later years here in the Verbatim ad, was a European keyboard virtuoso who made his way in the US by adding a distinctive comedy element to his solo touring performances.<p>So it&#x27;s only approprate to have him as a spokesman sitting at a computer keyboard, with his document looking not much different than sheet music. And he looks like he is tickling the ivories there, sticking mainly to the black keys I see.<p>Maybe a bit like Irving Berlin, who was the most popular songwriter for so many decades, and who <i>only</i> played on the black keys.<p>Interestingly, Berlin&#x27;s personal Steinway is now in the Smithsonian since it is a one-of-a-kind chromatic piano where he could mechanically shift the musical key the black keys were tuned for.<p>So he could get together with artists like Sinatra and play his tunes as originally written but in the singers&#x27; preferred key.<p>Now Borge was actually quite improvisational for a clasical musician.<p>He could get up there, introduce himself and play a number of 30 to 60 second interludes, and get away with saying or merely acting like he hadn&#x27;t made his mind up what full piece to play.<p>Then there could be a little monologue for a while which was one good reason so many were there to see him, but regardless of how excellent that was, the elephant in the room since the beginning had always been the significant percentage of the crowd who wanted nothing but the music.<p>Zappa had this too.<p>Borge would flip up his coat-tails, move closer to the microphone and say in his European accent &quot;Do you want to hear Great Music? Classics?&quot;<p>He then quickly extends his arms in the characteristic way for more freedom of movement, puts his hands on the keys, moves closer to the microphone again and says &quot;Too bad!&quot;

I got into computers in high school around 1980. I used to read Byte magazine and studied every ad. So exciting! My senior year, after saving and saving my income from my $2.85&#x2F;hour after school job I bought an Apple ][+ for around $2000.

Moore&#x27;s Law porn.<p>As to how far we have progressed, I&#x27;d rather see us talk about how we interact with technology and how it changes our lives.<p>Smart phones are powerful computers. They are ubiquitous. They&#x27;re the computers we all have now. What have they accomplished? I can always contact someone, though loneliness seems to have increased. People can also contact me all the time, sometimes with video. Nobody wears watches because they carry phones, so we missed the Dick Tracy future. Nobody can be lost anymore because they (and many other entities) always know where on earth they are. All of those things are absent from the old ads.<p>Our &quot;progress&quot; is mostly about surveillance whereas the old ads were all about what individuals could accomplish. And there&#x27;s definitely progress in how things are marketed to us. Aren&#x27;t those old ads clunky?

Don&#x27;t forget to adjust for inflation. A $4.5k disk drive in 1990 would cost around $9k today.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usinflationcalculator.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usinflationcalculator.com&#x2F;</a>

&quot;By the time the 1980s came to an end, it was unusual for a household to be without a personal computer.&quot;<p>As someone who graduated college when the 1980s came to an end, I can say it was unusual for a household to HAVE a computer. They were a major purchase, any communication with the outside world was via dial-up modem to a BBS, and most families had no practical reason for them.

That was my little boy dream, to play the Bird vs Magic basketball video game. I had an Atari 2600 back then and was buying used computer magazine and when that was released it looked amazing compared to the stick figure basketball on the 2600

When I think about how freeing having a personal computer was back then, and then think about how computing devices are used now to track people, control speech, and generally keep people in line - I don&#x27;t think of progress.

Bird vs Johnson&#x2F;Jordan, possibly what is in that picture, is one of my all time favorite games.

I always feel amazed when I see a large micro-SD card (1TB for example) and compare it to my Atari 800 which had three 16k ram cartridges, each larger than an iPhone Max. So this micro-SD card the size of my thumbnail is 67 million times the memory of one of those cartridges.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vintagecomputer.net&#x2F;atari&#x2F;800&#x2F;atari_800_48kRAM-10KROM.JPG" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vintagecomputer.net&#x2F;atari&#x2F;800&#x2F;atari_800_48kRAM-10...</a>

The technology has progressed. But have <i>humans</i> progressed?

A really good place to see old computer ads in context is on magazine archives.<p>Archive.org has the BYTE archives.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE</a><p>It is fun to go back and browse them.

Man for me it was realizing my phone has ~ 200x the flops of the Cray XMP from Jurassic Park.

The optimism around computers in the 1980s is a noteworthy juxtaposition with that site itself. Given the impressively large number of different commercial surveillance companies to which that site is selling out everyone.

Pixel art actually displayed nicer on CRT monitors, and DOS interfaces were pretty fast and keyboard optimized, and there wasn&#x27;t an industry dedicated to spying on you. So not always for the better.

I remember many of those ads from when they appeared!<p>I like that the author showed a lot of ads with girls operating the computer. Typically it was boys (or whatever) with his sister just passively standing by. Of course it was the 80s and apparently it was quite common for the “family computer” to be installed in the son’s room.<p>TBH my favorite part was being reminded of the absurd clothing people wore in those days and the incredible clutter of <i>stuff</i> people had everywhere.

&gt; the Apple Laser Printer quickly became the preferred printer of choice for computer owners of all brands.<p>In 1984? No, it did not. Most everyone was using dot matrix printers in 1984.

A modern HDD is 15-30 million times cheaper per byte than that 10mb “hard disk you’ve been waiting for” ad according to diskprices.com. What will get 30 million times better in the future vs. what is tapped out?<p>‪If you adjust for inflation assuming the year was 1980, the drive would cost $12,000 in today’s dollars. So today’s drives are over 800 million times cheaper. Plus lighter and way faster I’m sure. So more than 1B times better, easily, with 42 years of progress. ‬

I honestly think nothing has really changed. You can see SCO saying &quot;We have graphics now! People will want to use Unix on the desktop now&quot; all the way back in the 80s. Computers keep getting bigger but the software keeps up with it. All that&#x27;s really changed is that we have more computers since the smallest ones are so cheap, even so we had cheap MCUs back then.

Here&#x27;s my H11:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;WalterBright" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;WalterBright</a><p>Yes, I built the computer, floppy drive, and terminal from Heathkits. They all worked first try! I really enjoyed those kits.<p>Sadly, the only thing left is the terminal sitting in the garage.

Brings back so many memories. Back then getting new stuff would save you money, but now things are going in opposite direction for some use cases. Supply chain has eliminated some new products such as Raspberry PIs. I have instead been buying up broken screen laptops for about $50 to get better powered mini servers.

Everytime I see prices of hard drives back in the day, I get a feeling that&#x27;s a mixture of claustrophobia, despair and shock.

Well, two things haven&#x27;t changed. The first is the ad, &quot;you always find something in the last place you look, but a computer has 20000 places.&quot; The other is the need for a cup of coffee and a sandwich if you&#x27;re really going to get down to some serious computing.

They&#x27;re playing 1 on 1. I loved breaking the backboard<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dBluMt9taF4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dBluMt9taF4</a>

this doesn&#x27;t show we&#x27;ve progressed at all, it just shows we&#x27;re still distracted by colors and lights

I recall alot of advertisements in computer magazines from the late 80s featuring bikini girls and sexual innuendo.

Tangential rant: Why are so many sites these days so Google-centric? All the world isn&#x27;t a modern computer and&#x2F;or running Chrome. webp is not a universal standard yet.<p>Are hosting services that allow serving different files based on user agent really that hard to find? Or has everyone just drank the Google Flavor Aid?

I first started working in web development in 2005. We had Pentium 4 servers, running at what would probably feel like 1ghz today (P4 had some pipeline problems), with probably a gig or 2 of RAM, on-prem. Core count? No idea. I&#x27;m guessing 4 at the most, but it might have only been 2. We usually ran two servers, one for app server and one for databases, though there were frequently multiple apps and multiple databases on those servers. Such a machine probably cost around $3k at the time, (IDK, I&#x27;m just guessing. Also, inflation has been about 50% since then). Most of that cost was probably in disk arrays. I was working on GIS apps, so we had &quot;a lot&quot; of data at rest.<p>We had dedicated DBAs and sys admins. Most of the difficulty in getting applications built was A) being young and not knowing what I was doing, B) communicating and getting approved configuration changes with the sys admins for whatever stupid thing we were being asked to do by bizdev, C) communicating and getting approved scheme changes in the database with the DBAs without having a local copy we could modify at will to test anything before going to staging.<p>Today, I have my servers in the cloud. I&#x27;m given 2 cores at 1ghz with like 4gb of RAM. It&#x27;s about $2k a year. Every year. Or in that ballpark. It&#x27;s not a huge diff from 17 years ago.<p>My laptop has 14 cores running at atleast 3.5ghz, with 64gb of RAM. Plus a massive GPU. It also cost about $2k. I work in VR so I spend that every two years.<p>The server backends I build now are not significantly different than I ever did. The front ends are significantly more complex (I thought I was pretty hot shit making a 2D graphics API in JS out of absolutely positioned DIVs as &quot;pixels&quot; back then, before Canvas was a thing, and now I do full motion 3D in VR at 120hz).<p>So IDK. I probably got some minor details wrong, I&#x27;m not going to look absolutely everything up. Take it for a rough approximation.<p>One thing that strikes me is that, operationally, things are vastly different, but not necessarily easier. I don&#x27;t have to get anyone to approve anything anymore, but that&#x27;s mostly because I&#x27;m the one in charge now and I know what I&#x27;m doing now. Front end tooling has improved thanks to TypeScript, but that&#x27;s also come with massive amounts of other complications because it still needs to be JS at the end of the day. NPM has made it easier to get and manage dependencies, but the creaking tower of transpilers and bundling tools has clawed a lot of those gains back.<p>I used to be able to clone a repo, start visual studio, hit F5, and after about 45s for a full, first time rebuild, I&#x27;d be in the app. Now I need to restore dependencies, make sure all the build tools are at the right versions, make sure all the separate build tools are running in the right order and time. Sometimes it doesn&#x27;t work, because it&#x27;s not clear why TypeScript is using VS&#x27; outdated lib.d.ts files that install by default instead of the ones that are in my node_modules.<p>It &quot;works&quot;, but it&#x27;s deeply dissatisfying. I can never tell if introducing a new project into the repo is going to break first-time setup. I&#x27;m able to do more on the project I have already setup, but seeing up new projects has gotten so difficult that I often find myself so mentally overwhelmed (disgust, avoidance, etc) that I just don&#x27;t, I go back to working on the one project instead of trying something new.<p>Don&#x27;t know where I&#x27;m going with this, but there it be.

Our numbers certainly have increased. And everybody likes that.

I miss the days when everything was simple ASCII Text :)

Magellan sounds better than what we have available now.

These ads show not only how much we progressed in terms of technology but also as being a society with less prejudice and misogyny. Take a look at the role of women on those photos. Disgusting!

Seems to me there&#x27;s not been much progress.

It’s definitely different.<p>Progress is a value judgement.

Thank you for sharing this.

these are amazing.<p>also a lot a very cringe inducing. but no less amazing.