

PC Ads of the past - boh
http://dizorb.com/2010/09/17/pc-ads-of-the-past/

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sgarman
Apple's site did not look like that back then, I just checked waybackmachine.
Is this a fabricated ad?

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Posibyte
The Apple Lisa was released in 1983, way before WorldWideWeb. This was
probably just a retro-mock comparing their devices of yesteryear to today
(notice the iPhone).

To answer your question, this is a fabricated ad.

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erickhill
"Checkout this Amiga, promoting the quality of graphics it can produce."

Actually, those were, and are, good graphics.

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ari_elle
I thought exactly the same. I don't like the way this article is written: it
seems to mock the technology and it seems like it's written by somebody
handling these units on a daily basis (and i guess most people do in our time)
without knowing what they mean? Any technical person would reminisce in great
love for the toys we had back than, this is written in a complete ignorant
tone.... maybe i am just oversensitive on this one. Who knows....

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simba-hiiipower
pretty awesome. it’s really interesting looking at old advertising like this;
puts things into perspective and shows just how far technology has progressed.

from these, i find it especially amazing what was considered 'portable' back
in the day, whoa!

imagine what computing would look like if in 25+ years people looking back to
something like the iphone woud be thinking the same.

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gaius
... Or not progressed. What can you do now that you couldn't do in 1990? All
the extra power, and more, has been soaked up in deeper and deeper layers of
abstraction. A desktop from then, like GEM or Workbench or Arthur is
recognisably modern. Windows or OSX or KDE are just tweaks.

If computing in 25 years is more of the same, we'll have failed.

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keithpeter
I take your point, but as an Arthur/RISC-OS user for many years now using
Ubuntu linux on a recycled x86 PC I get

\- audio/video encoding, editing and playback and format conversion.

\- a _lot_ more pixels (1920x1080x24bit vs 640x512x8bit - a 19 times ratio,
plus accelerated desktop).

\- I could browse the web on the A3000 (12 MHz/2Mb) but it was slooooow, just
keeping up with the 14k4 modems.

And, yes, I do mostly the same things, LibreOffice and LaTeX instead of
!Impress and !Sigma. Vi or Gedit instead of !Zap.

I can see me using a low power Arm based desktop when the SoCs become powerful
enough to run GIMP and Audacity.

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dubya
I remember that decoding GIFs was pretty advanced for the Atari ST I had as a
teen. Compiling C code on a floppy was pretty slow as well.

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keithpeter
Interesting adverts for computer enthusiasts, with explicit technical details.

Computers were also a symbol of 'modern' and 'scientific objectivity' before
the Web and advertising. Have a look at...

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8403291/avdert19911130.jpg>

This is part of an advert dating from 1991 November 30th in the Independent
magazine. I kept a few pages of Marketa Luskacova's Brick Lane photos from
that issue as they have not been published in book form, but the text of the
advert has been lost to time. This image can be read in so many ways, the
power relations that come from access to the data!

The advert was for some kind of health care or nursing service. The terminal
looks to be some kind of mini-computer?

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rpeden
I have a pile of PC Magazines from the late 80s and early 90s. I'll have to
dig up them up and post some of those ads online, as well. They're similar to
these, but for different companies and products.

