Retro personal computer ads from the 1980s
rarehistoricalphotos.com
rarehistoricalphotos.com
If you hoped to make money in the microcomputer field, as I did, you learned a lot: what corporate purchasers were thinking about, what consumer trends were happening, which companies were successful enough to pay for full-page ads over a period of months, and indirectly what systems were selling because of third-party ads.
If you were making the buying decision for yourself on what would be the equivalent of about $10,000 with of equipment, all market signals were worth observing. It was one thing for Apple to spend a lot on Apple ][ ads, but it was something else entirely to see how quickly the notion of IBM PC compatibility was featured in software or accessories by companies that weren't IBM.
I purchased some magazines 50% because of their ads and 50% for editorial; in the case of PC Shopper, a tabloid-size magazine that could be 600-800 pages, perhaps 70% because of ads, 30% editorial.
The meta perspective was fun too: no one really knew the best ways to advertise so there were many different approaches early on. Games had extremely fanciful cover art that had zero to do with the actual rendered graphics. Infocom's ads for their popular text-only ads were, duh, all text and had extraordinarily good copy. Ads for database managers ended up being DBMS tutorials that too often ended up mentioning recipes. Obviously I never saw an Apple or IBM or Commodore machine hoisted up on someone's kitchen counter, recipe opened, IRL.
It wasn't always creative or interesting though. Even 40 years ago my friend and I were making fun of endless pictures showing two white people in front of a monitor, with one pointing at it and the other trying to look excitedly at 80-column text or a 4-color pie chart in 320x200 resolution.
Some that look exciting to me are: an AI that lets you animate still photos realistically [1], a simple website that guides you to discover new parks, eateries, and other places near you [2], an AI that colorizes old black-and-white photos/video [3], a Street View style map of the game world from "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild", with some 1st person 360 degree photos [4], and a tiny game engine that lets you distribute your whole game physically via printed QR codes [5].
If marketing and graphic design people ever felt like getting together to do some 'side projects', I vote that they should make print ads for apps/websites that they like :)
[1] https://github.com/AliaksandrSiarohin/first-order-model
[2] https://randomlocation.xyz (https://randomlocation.xyz/help.txt for customization)
[3] https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify
'A just machine to make big decisions, programmed by fellas with compassion and vision...'
VR might be revolutionary, but we won't know until after several more years, when it's either gone mainstream or clearly stalled out. I know there are people who will immediately nitpick that VR isn't revolutionary, which is ironic because this happens any time there's a nascent potentially revolutionary technology about: people nitpicking that it's not good enough yet, or arguing that it's not compelling (which is often just because it's not mature enough yet).
You don't know if anything's actually revolutionary until it's mature and saturated the market, but by then it's not really new anymore, so it's easy to dismiss it as old hat. By the time smartphones had percolated down to the point where even working-class randos had them, we'd had iOS and Android for several years, and of course earlier forms of smartphones for several years or more before those.
For a long time they were dismissed as mere "toys for techies" with limited real-world application for the regular person. Which was true, until it suddenly wasn't.
People had seen computers running corporate departments and calculating orbits for NASA. Suddenly they were told they could have one too. At home.
The fact that it didn't do much was part of the fun, because it meant you had to master the technology to make it usable.
So it was a double pitch - personal power, personal mastery.
Modern computing doesn't offer that. It's all about playing in someone else's sand pit. Whether it's FB/Twitter, the app store, or an Amazon drop shipping business, or an ad-funded entertainment site, or a side project on GitHub - you're working inside an environment imposed on you by others, which you can't change and don't own.
You could say "How is that different to BASIC?" The difference is that using BASIC never felt like being part of someone else's machine. It was your tool, you could what you liked with it. There was no sense of being a cog in a factory which printed money for other people.
Maybe that is how you experienced it as a computer nerd like myself, but that was not the pitch.
For business it was computers for all just like the big boys. For families it was prepare your kids for this new computer oriented world. For us kids it was play computer games at home without having to stick coins into a machine at the mall. But us kids had to play the education angle on our parents who had credit cards. :-)
Until then only big companies could afford a computer to manage their data and accounting, etc. Microcomputers changed that and made the hardware available to every company.
VisiCalc on the software side was the killer app that relatively normal people could learn and use to improve their business work. Spreadsheets were certainly a revolution.
On the home front, affordable microcomputers arrived and it was widely recognised that the revolution was here. Computers were the future and every parent should get one to prepare their kids (ok, sons) for it. This explains the marketing around microcomputers being for families.
Along similar lines, the Steam Deck and similar mobile gaming PC's are pretty neat, but again, kinda janky.
ADA is a mil-spec compiled language often used for embedded control. It took a long time to implement a full compiler and the smallest machines it ran on were minis.
The closest thing - and it's really not close at all - is probably the FORTH-based Jupiter Ace, designed by the people who designed the ZX Spectrum.
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-05-rescan/pag...
https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/80s/Byte-1981-01....
To me if Lynx R1 had a little bit better field of view and just worked slightly better then that type of device could be a game changer.
Over the next few years the comfort and capabilities of AR devices may actually make desktop computing for productivity obsolescent.
I think there is also going to be a major revolution one or two decades down the line with brain computer interfaces. I wonder what type of ad you need to create that market.
But also maybe one or more like two decades down the line we can probably expect real compute-in-memory devices.
The "metaverse" still has some competition going. It may turn out that much of what people call the metaverse is a new type of browser that uses web assembly and a special shading language or something to create a type of networked operating system on top of various platforms. There is still room for competition in determining those standards.
Hopefully one or more of these paradigm shifts will provide at least a brief period of somewhat open competition.
Other UG Attendee: Here is your disk with zork on it, monsieur.
But the 80's were truly special - that's when computers went mainstream, Big Tech didn't yet exist, and every manufacturer had slightly different ideas on what computers should be doing.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221010024648/https://i.pinimg....
Also the "decision maker" ad has a woman thinking, "It must use Baysian, weighted factor analysis and..." which is an approach back in fashion!
At that point not everyone was comfortable with writing a check for $1000-2000, stuffing it in an envelope and hoping to get a computer back in the mail.
Apples were in computer stores, the Ace, perhaps, not so much.
Having an actual use case to run both Apple and CP/M software was rare. It was also complicated. If you were an end user running CP/M on your Apple, it very well just stayed that way. Hard enough to wrangle a single computer system, much less two completely different ones.
While the value proposition of the Ace was there, a market large enough to leverage it was not.
And by the time the market was experienced enough to appreciate the system, the IBM was coming out.
One use case for Apple and CP/M was to be able to run business software by day and play games at night.