

How they used to sell computers: Oldest computer ads:  - cwan
http://www.topdesignmag.com/oldest-computer-ads/

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SwellJoe
My first business was buying computers at garage sales and flea markets,
fixing them, and reselling them. I've owned most of the personal computer gear
in those ads, and a lot of interesting stuff not covered (like the original
Lisa, the Colecovision Adam with cassette storage that was as fast as most
floppy disk drives of the time, the huge TI99/4a expansion chassis with 8
slots).

Anyone who found this interesting should plan a trip to the Computer History
Museum in Mountain View. I can spend all day just wandering through the
collections, and listening to the docents (who are some of the same guys who
built the technology we take for granted today) telling stories. I learn
something new every time I visit, and I've been a nerd involved deeply in this
stuff for ~30 years.

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Legion
It's funny how many of these ads are aimed at "normal people", while "normal
people" today would be considered completely incapable of operating machines
as (relatively) user-unfriendly as some of these.

~~~
uvdiv
Or maybe normal people today simply have expectations in keeping with modern
technology? I'm sure modern Excel jockeys are fully _capable_ of slogging
through one of those assembly language manuals for dozens of hours. I think
they could also calculate radicals to five significant figures using pen-and-
paper algorithms, 19th-century style. Or till their own fields using oxen,
18th-century style. That these are all "unthinkable" today doesn't mean humans
have suddenly become stupider and weaker (the opposite is true); it means
they're immensely labor-consuming tasks which no longer serve a purpose, and
to perform them would be an astonishing waste of effort.

~~~
jawee
However, the expectation of easiness with computers does make one less-welling
to work through and figure out things when it is necessary, I've found.

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bryanlarsen
Oldest? Most of those ads are from the early 80's. There are a few real old
ones though -- the IBM AutoPoint 610 was released in 1957.

~~~
tzs
That's not the oldest one there, though. The LGP-30 was 1956.

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yason
Compuserve ad: "By the year 2000, the world may catch up with the way
Compuserve's electronic mall lets you shop today."

~~~
gojomo
Indeed: [http://www.topdesignmag.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/01/ad032...](http://www.topdesignmag.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/01/ad032.jpg)

I like that at the time, the mall photo shown inside the monitor would have
been understood as purely evocative/figurative – whereas in another few
decades, people looking back might wonder: "was that a real screen and was
this the first rendered virtual mall environment?"

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baddox
> _Innovation at it's Very Best_

I love glaring typos in prominent national advertisements.

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joshbert
I love MS, Gates and even like Ballmer. Having said that, get a load of this
gem:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk>

Amazing how commercials like this were helpful in the creation of such an
empire. Oh, how the times change.

~~~
bitwize
The scary thing is Steve Ballmer looks almost _exactly the same today_. I
think he may be fatter, though.

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ernestipark
I see TI's computers haven't changed much.

~~~
juhygtfghjk
Take an iPad, add a real touch type keyboard with mechanical switches, make
the screen B+W for longer battery life and include user replacable AA
batteries and you have the perfect TRS80 portable

~~~
beambot
Wouldn't that basically be a Kindle?

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bitwize
I think my dad had that 15MB hard disk unit from Radio Shack.

It was pretty sophisticated for its day. The previous model, an 8 MB unit, was
_half again as big_.

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dandrews
I remember a string of ads for minicomputer Fortran compilers, placed in
Computerworld circa 1970. One manufacturer (might have been Data General)
proudly stated that their compiler was "a pig", featuring long compile times
but turning out compact object code. Another manufacturer posted its own ad:
"Our tiger eats pigs".

A glass teletype ad was captioned "Tough TTY". Hee! Couldn't get away with
that these days.

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rbanffy
My only wish would be for the ads to have a high-res version. I'd love to read
them.

Some of them I never saw ;-)

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elliottcarlson
I still have a ZX-81, as well as a Epson HX-20 which is sadly not shown in
these ads. It's amazing how far this technology has come in such a short time
- and I love the prediction in the Compuserve ad about doing all shopping
online by 2000.

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oofoe
Should I be worried about how many of these I actually own?

By the way, I think the one in the Royal McBee advert is the predecessor to
the machine immortalized by the immortal programmer's programmer in the
pseudo-poem "The Story of Mel".

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nitrogen
I chuckled at the inflation of the VGA's color palette in the Tandy 5000 MC
ad. The VGA could display 16 or 256 simultaneous colors, but any palette entry
could be changed to any 18-bit (6-bit per channel) RGB triplet (i.e. 256ki
colors).

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electromagnetic
The thing that amazed me; "1K of memory expandable to 16K". I have yet to see
this in a pre-built computer. The best I've seen was back when I had 128MB
expandable to 1GB.

Although then again, a computer today comes with a year or more of warranty,
while this had a 90-day warranty - which would personally scare the shit out
of me today on an electronic product. Today that's dead in 6 months.

~~~
trezor
Those did indeed exist. My first computer actually only had 16kb of RAM, which
was "plenty" given the typical simplicity of applications back then.

~~~
electromagnetic
I didn't mean 16K was small, I meant I've yet to see a 16-fold increase in
upgradeable RAM size in a pre-built computer.

~~~
trezor
In that case I should probably mention the 16mb (yup megabytes) upgrade you
could get for the Commodore 64, up from 64kb.

It was a silly thing and needless to say, stupidly expensive.

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shorbaji
Is it just me or do these ads look fairly similar to the landing pages of your
typical web app?

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Keyframe
Damn, haven't heard of Cromemco in a long time! Thanks for sharing this.

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bad_user
My God, how expensive they were.

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fleitz
The Tandy 1000sx ad really surprised me, the ad must have worked as there is
one in my moms attic. Thats the computer that got me started programming.

~~~
dugmartin
Same with me - I ended up changing out the processor and installing a 5mb hard
disk that cost $500 and sounded like a jet engine when it booted.

------
to
for xmas 1989 i got a C64. my uncle, big show off, got my cousins (two girls)
an amiga. why? cause it cost a bit more. turns out amiga sucked and my C64 was
pretty much awesome until i got a 286 a bit later. i even remember begging for
4MB more RAM so i can play rise of the triad ... anyway, thinking back it
kinda feels like the C64 was a more open platform and everyone else was pretty
much fucked.

