How they used to sell computers: Oldest computer ads:
topdesignmag.com
topdesignmag.com
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.
Also, any parts about people being "weaker" or "stupider" are your words, not mine.
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?"
I love glaring typos in prominent national advertisements.
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.
It was pretty sophisticated for its day. The previous model, an 8 MB unit, was half again as big.
A glass teletype ad was captioned "Tough TTY". Hee! Couldn't get away with that these days.
Some of them I never saw ;-)
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".
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.
My first was a 48KB Sinclair Spectrum which I used for at least 5 years, and the games coming out by the end of that time were much more sophisticated than the early ones, e.g. filled 3D polygon graphics over blocky 2D sprites. The programmers just had to squeeze more and more out of the same hardware.
These days, a similar jump in sophistication just doesn't happen without new hardware.
Once a platform is new, nobody really knows what it can do and how it can best be exploited. Like on the Commodre 64, you had a limit of 8 hardware sprites, each one either 32x32 pixels mono-coloured or 16x32 pixels tri-coloured (iirc). This didn't really allow you to do much fancy games or graphics.
But once people discovered that you could reuse those same sprites multiple times during a single screen-refresh by timing your sprite-programming to whatever scan-line the machine was outputting, the genuine was out of the box: The Commodore 64 and its games would never be the same again.
With changing hardware or a hardware abstraction layer, this would probably never have been possible to do reliably or at all. I'm willing to guess that having hardware stability, predictability and closeness can be listed as a requirement for allowing developers and games over time to discover just how far something can be stretched.
For phones and a million other different mobile appliances I think this will be much harder, although not impossible. I doubt will see the same sort of mad capability leaps over time on these devices. But hey, you never know ;)
It was a silly thing and needless to say, stupidly expensive.